Dispatch | Page 7 | The Common

Two Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik

May 25, 2022 Dispatches

Translated from the Spanish by ILAN STAVANS

Mexico City, Mexico

Translator’s Note

Translation is home. Whenever I travel, I seek it either by reading translations, or by translating as a grounding exercise. Lately I have been translating into English poems from Jewish Latin American poets, specifically works by conversos or those written in Yiddish and Ladino by immigrants and their offspring. And—in a room of her own—Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life makes me think of Emily Dickinson. I recreated these two poems while visiting my mother, who has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Pizarnik distills the fibers of existence so as to reveal the madness that palpitates underneath. Her poetry is contagious. The toughest part is to convey her silences. I wish I had met her.

—Ilan Stavans

From Lviv In March

March 23, 2022 Dispatches

By NICK MAIONE

Lviv, Ukraine

They Say You Are Everywhere

March 9, 2022 Dispatches, Poetry

By KRISTA J.H. LEAHY

Unincorporated Arapahoe County, Colorado

Through mantle, earth, gender, air
                        through false stories and true
undistracted by pectin, pucker, time
                         scale, sugar, seed, dripped rainbow of
oil, prism, crushed berry residue,
                         om of home, acid, oxygen song—
I grip jelly jars to my eyes
                         mock binocular my way to You—

How Memory Works

February 23, 2022 Dispatches

By TIM TIM CHENG

A shattered porcelain shard of a city drawing laid on a white background.

“Newspaper Transferral on Plaster” by Hasami Ho (2020)

Location: Hong Kong

on the sudden closure of Apple Daily, the biggest pro-democracy press in Hong Kong

1.
We see the newspaper for tomorrow, not tomorrow
It’s already midnight. Today that is. News that stays
warm and inky on our fingertips at 2:30 am.

In Absence of Mourning

February 9, 2022 Dispatches

By NATALIA MAGNANI

Gomel, Belarus

It had been fifteen years since my family left for the US, but my grandparents’ room in Gomel had not changed. I sat on the same Soviet-era sofa, holding the same replica of Cheburashka, my childhood-favorite TV character. The occasion of my visit had prompted Dedushka, my Belarusian grandpa, to take me to the village where he was born, now dilapidated, to generations of ancestors’ graves, through documents that told something of our fragmented history. One evening Dedushka donned his army uniform, and presented me with a newspaper clip detailing my father’s death. My grandmother was quiet, resigned to the shadows of old books and toys.

Dispatches: Stella Wong

January 26, 2022 Dispatches

By STELLA WONG

Spooks (Pidgin)

Iowa City

Re: M Moore

This is the mess.
This is the age we wrought.

Quarters

January 12, 2022 Dispatches

By BEINA XU

Berlin, Germany

I live in the wrong colonial quarter of Berlin.

My neighborhood is called Afrikanisches Viertel, and my flat is on Guinea Street. There’s Kongostraße, Togostraße, Kamerunerstraße, Transvaalstraße, Sansibarstraße, Otawistraße—I could go on, but you could also just Google Germany’s colonial conquest of Africa.

R Is for Revival Field

December 29, 2021 Dispatches

By WILLIAM WOOLFITT

St. Paul, Minnesota

R is for raw sewage, riverine wetland, rubbish, rookery of herons and egrets, rusting barrels of toxic waste. I try to imagine all of this at Pig’s Eye Lake. Surrounding it, marsh, cottonwoods, floodplain, bluffs above the great river. It’s a place the Dakota consider sacred, James Rock says. Čhokáŋ Taŋka, the Dakota call it: the big middle. I try to imagine the burial mounds that were blown up with dynamite, and railyards, locks and dams, dredging, and all the household trash that was dumped in the marsh, the industrial debris: lead-acid batteries, solvents, electrical transformers, burnt sludge. Eight million cubic yards, some of it fluorosurfectants—the so-called forever chemicals needed to make non-stick frying pans, stain-repellent for couches and rugs—the PFOS that have spread everywhere, now taint my blood, and yours, and every creature’s.

Delete/Recover

October 20, 2021 Dispatches

By AKWE AMOSU

New York City

After Kenosha, Wisconsin, 26 August 2020

1. Erasure

I went to the for water,
although I had no thirst, again
unable to find           Not sleeping,
roaming restless, hunting
at 2am for on my phone,
no rabbit hole too deep, however
dull, aching tired as though
I had been
Only three days into this,
asked how my was
going, I launched into a tense
that the question even
deserved and saw how hard,
again, I was trying not to          the
plain fact that right in front of us,
again, the cop had emptied
his     into a human,
now                yet shackled
to his hospital bed. That again, a
young        had taken down a human
with a military grade           yet
away from the scene unhindered.
And that, again, we were being asked
to choke off thoughts, stifle
any            sound, stave and belt
the chest to                our agitation,
keep breathing because, again,
we

Bat Season in Austin

September 8, 2021 Dispatches

BY SARAH GIRAGOSIAN

Austin, TX

The warm May evening fairly sizzled with bats. Out from under the crannies of Congress Avenue Bridge, Mexican free-tailed bats slipped out in threes, then tens, then hundreds, and flooded the Austin night, sipping from the skies tens of thousands of pounds of insects, as they did every spring and summer night. I felt at once the tickling of wings behind my ears and began shivering uncontrollably. No, fortunately not a bat—just the flick of a stranger’s ponytail at the back of my neck. But the shivery feeling remained; that contact with a stranger was a switch point in my mind. Any kind of creature, wonderful or mundane, slinked in the nooks and crannies of the city celebrated for its weirdness.

All posts tagged: Dispatch

Two Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik

From Lviv In March

They Say You Are Everywhere

How Memory Works

In Absence of Mourning

Dispatches: Stella Wong

Quarters

R Is for Revival Field

Delete/Recover

Bat Season in Austin

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