Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah The birds’ departure from his heart leaves the plains white where the story is white and sleep is white and silence is the caller’s icon. A laugh of sand will sprout when the door is opened from fear’s angle, a hymn for the grand winter, and the voices of…
In Heaven ants are the doormen to the flies I climbed out of one butchered ballroom into another climbing out of my half-life into my new life on earth My brother right behind me Home The ants are a straight line of suicides showing us the way out of here The flies are suicides with…
Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author I’ve invented a machine that, as soon as a goldfinch opens its throat, starts dumping bags of concrete inside. Who licked the candies into concrete, we don’t know. Who then brought the concrete to life, we don’t know. The goldfinch sails. The goldfinch sings. Where…
To begin with, Terrance Hayes is a compulsive storyteller, and prone to enthusiasm. He says, “What’s going on?” to start a conversation, “Sure, sure” in agreement, and “Later” for good-bye. He is always doing something artistic, be it sketching—he carries a tin with paper and pens, and drawings by him and his son, wherever he…
Every year they come together like the risen sap of bamboo,? cross cut canes pitch and toss,? all the families waving, in the white laden branches of the pear trees. Hives that once sang like choirs lie against the gable walls? of their churches and schools, tossed in the dust of quarantine,? old tea chests,…
There are only two things in the world I don’t know. The square root of 77 is 8.972. The capital of Michigan is Kalamazoo. Most everything is simple if you know where to go. The Internet is a gold mine. The dictionary is good too, and there are still only two things in…
All afternoon she does battle with the keyboard, pausing only to ram her bifocals upward with an exasperated knuckle or yank out some more of her hair. Your heart is an icicle, she accuses her heroine. Your gestures—are you made of tin? she inquires of her hero, kicking his ankles for good measure. And as…
You should have seen the sea in those days, wind smoke and weeping flares washing ashore from the barrios, all those hesitant evacuees, as tarpaulin stretched along Beaufort’s Dyke and our drift nets sailed through the Hebrides. Shuffling in pipe smoke, scribbling a plume of grave longing on the bones of a wax-bright dusk, I…
If you add up all the babies floating in space, if you climb to the top of a falling tree, if you drink up all the whiskey in the Arabian Sea, you will have done something important for the human race, something of nonsense and impossibility. If you see something disappear without a…
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