The mansion where Gone with the Wind was written sits up on blocks
like a trailer, underpinnings exposed, like a trailer, trucked down a road,
relocated from one county to another that also can’t afford its restoration,
a green curtain of vines drawing over the decay. What should stay?
By OONA PATRICK
The Alentejo is the landscape of heartbreak. Or at least it was to me. Even its trees are clearly loners, set apart from each other at distant intervals across miles of sere brown fields. The Alentejo is all about waiting, from its numbered cork trees, with their skinned underbellies between harvest years, to the fabled, and perhaps fictional, nun Mariana, writing from Beja to a lover who will never come back. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun have been awaiting an author, an answer, for three and a half centuries now. Once celebrated for sparking a revolution in the European epistolary novel, now considered out of fashion even in Portugal, they remain a literary enigma, the country’s Mona Lisa.
By ANANDA LIMA
I close my right eye meu olho direito
and see everything tudo que
my mother my father meus pais no meu país
didn’t
know não sabiam
to do tudo
then que fazer?
e hoje, minha vista cansada
By STEVEN LEYVA
“… and there is promise in such sweat.”
—John Proctor, from The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
Given this ruddy, straightened wig no one could place
my face on a spectral scale of “ethnic.” I slid
on and off stage. I spoke plain. I didn’t name names. Some
audiences mistook me for Muscogee Creek. I spoke
in first person. Under that wig I wore cornrows
in Oklahoma’s emaciated winter.
By LEONARDO TONUS
Translated by CAROLYNE WRIGHT
they say that the most impressive of all crossings
is not thirst
or the fear
afterwards.
The humiliation
no longer wounds
what does not exist
they say
bodies in a boat
of bodies
veins
eyes
skin
penis
nails
vagina
35 Enter inhale. Enter time. Enter inheritance.
Enter or else. Enter doors with handles,
without handles, manually manipulated. Enter alone
feelings. Enter tension. Struggle entering
bitterness enter. Love turning towards lust enter.
Historic languages enter. Human conditions of
oppression enter. Enter roadside assistance. Enter
talented man killed too soon. Gravemarker write
L.O.W. Enter near Dayton settlement but
specifically at Englewood location. Enter chirping
bird sounds out of the ceiling again. Enter your
own music mixing up into the chirps of birds. Enter
memory again. Enter thought again. Enter more and
more gunshots. Enter yelling. Enter empathy and
critical engagement.
By LANDA WO
“Grief is never more than a house being rebuilt.”
Ntolle Mbuyi1
Little Cabindan history
All the Cabindan strategies were there
To mount the portrait of a free Cabinda.
The historic chief discoursed on education
The Cabindan earth sketched a faint smile.
By JOSÉ PINTO DE SÁ
Translated by JETHRO SOUTAR
Papá announced, “Maria, I’m going to war,” and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. Mamã, clearing the table, gave her usual start. She stood stranded in the kitchen doorway, a dirty plate in each hand.
Going to war meant going out in the dead of night to David’s bar, playing hide-and-seek with military patrols. Our lot’s supporters gathered there after hours, drank a few beers, exchanged questionable information and reliable rumors. It had been the same every night for the last three weeks, since their lot retook the city.
After dinner, Papá would say, “Maria, I’m going to war,” and Mamã would give a start, try to talk him out of it, remind him of martial law and the curfew.
Then, out of desperation, she’d say, “At least wait for the shooting to die down.”
By BRUCE BOND
When the smoke cleared and took with it the sirens
and the uniforms strung across our sofas,
what remained were rivers, mist, whisper as a habit,
red dawn in the eyes of the sleep-deprived.
In the brush, here and there, beside the highway,
the revenant scent of metal and decay.
By ADRIENNE SU
When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center,
the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown.
Jews had been in Henan so close to forever,
they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had found
an exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases.
Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.
Migration was not always out of the places
our families had fled; it had once been to.
Our pantries were “ethnic” not just for the shrimp chips
and wood ears, but as well for the matzah.
Maybe, when asked, Do you celebrate Christmas?,
we were not being checked for Zen or the Buddha.
We didn’t say it in so many words.
The line between Asia and Europe had blurred.
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