Jamie Ross
PETERBILT

So he falls again. And again. From the bed, the
stairs, his low-slung chair, my father, from my fable. As
night falls, I fall, as snow falls on the cabin, on routes
these years have cut in rock, the clutch, the scar
that wraps his forearm tighter to the wheel, turning
asphalt into dawn or dusk, the darkness
of a certain skin whose yearning spreads like fire. He’s
driving wind now pressed against each stud, each
bolt and rivet in the gray ravines above the Mancos
pounding slate and rotten schist, sunken willow,
driving up the banks, the piling vaults, packing
freight in sleet, in seeking rain, each light
obscured by flesh, the red star route of backrow
streets, the black side-roll through the Hatch, he’s
driving grease the spitfire pots
the dirty coffee counter smears of more or don’t
until the gears heat harder, higher up the
      Cumbres passage
into pine and sheet-bent poplar breaking back
beyond the throat of gasoline through
     grinding valves the glassy
skin near sudden bone of stare through father driving
blood twelve tons of sheep four tiers of panic bleating
shit my father drive me drive this son I push
against this stench the speed the gun-gray bales,
     against this box
behind the cab, the bed behind us farther farther
     throttled
beachhead splitcraft pylons crumbling steeper
     metal twisted
hands her face above the silos, fields,
     roast-pit red, pushed to
pavement, pistons, driving snow, driving bridge, the
     diving like-
ness of yourself when the child came down in the mist of      names.

ESSAYS & HYBRID FORMS

George Gessert
from AN ORGY OF POWER

I am reluctant to write about torture. It holds no special fascination for me – on the contrary, I find the subject repellent. But I did not choose the times I live in, nor do I choose what I am compelled to write. As a writer I am committed to speaking from my own experience, which may seem to counsel silence. I have not been to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Guantánamo Bay. I am not a journalist or an authority on the history of torture. But the perimeters of experience do not end with what is immediate. In today’s world, almost everything connects with everything else. The coffee that fuels my writing was raised in Kenya, my shirt was made in China. Reports arrive daily from around the world. The problem is sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, the true from the false, and assigning each bit of information something like its proper weight. These things make learning gradual, writing slow, and these notes very late.

Rebecca Cook
from INSIDE HERMAN INSIDE IRENE

So let’s start at a place called the beginning the way stories have to start somewhere and in the beginning she sat down at her computer and began to type and in the beginning she was desperate and in the beginning she found a tear widening in the bottom of her chest and was very tired of what words can bring and very tired of reaching out her hands to grab on to find a place to hold on to until the end would come and if this story is to move forward there must be a plot or at least something that loosely resembles a plot but as you have probably heard there are so few stories to tell and what’s eating her is that our plot could be almost anything and still end up being a story you’ve already heard no matter how hard she tries to make it original and fresh and her answer to the short supply of plots might be to try and trick you if she can misdirect you pull you into a feat of legerdemain inside a trick of her wrist inside the words slipping past you onto the page faster than her hand is faster that your eye is faster than the words filling up while you watch while you’re willing to pretend and extend your willing suspension of disbelief further than the words can go or to lead them where they will go eventually whichever comes first the story inside the woman or the story inside the reader or inside the beginning or inside the place inside her hand holding onto a place to climb into a place that is a secret that Herman keeps under his bed.

Herman is a recovering pedophile and he keeps a secret stash of child pornography under his bed for emergencies and what a normal life he would lead except for these terrible urges and how would the neighbors react if they knew about him and how his therapist tells him every week that he has the right to live his life, that he is better, that he can control himself, that he can walk by the school playground on his way to work without getting an erection, that he can be an almost normal person living in America but Herman is not so sure.

FICTION

Michael A. FitzGerald
from OYSTERS

     It has been nearly thirty minutes. Josh waves the man over and asks where the mussels are.
     “The first boy drown. But second boy is very good,” the man says. “He’ll be done very quickly.”
     “Que?” Josh often reverts to Spanish, his only foreign language, in any country outside the U.S.
     “The first boy was not a very good swimmer. The tides are bad this time of day. Most people eat mussels at evening. But do not worry. More Budweiser, on the house. Your food will be done soon. Very fresh mussels.” The man points out the window to an empty pontoon skiff. “My son, he’s getting them now. He’ll be done very soon.” He nods approvingly, then turns to Josh and Sara, does a half bow, turns, and walks away.
     “First boy drown?” Sara says when the kitchen door shuts behind the man.
     “He could not mean that. We aren’t understanding him.”
     They look out the window. The empty pontoon skiff rises and dips as a swell passes under it. The dot of a boy’s head pops through the surface, then moves toward the boat. He pulls himself up, and empties a satchel. He slips back under water. Another swell lifts the boat and rocks it forward.
     “Stop him,” she says.

Christopher Feliciano Arnold
from PRIMARY NEXT OF KIN

     At the Whataburger I’m waiting in line behind Davis the medic and a chaplain who I just met this morning. Dressed in our class A’s, we look sharp, all lines. Standing in the middle of all these civilians, we should be proud to be soldiers. Davis orders a double bacon cheeseburger combo, takes his cup over to the Coke machine and fills it with some concoction of different flavors. The chaplain steps up to the counter and the girl at the cash register looks up at him. He’s a tall guy, big too, but his voice is so soft that he has to repeat himself three times before the girl hears him. He’d be better off just pointing at the menu. I decide on chicken strips. The girl hands me an orange plastic number and I slide into a booth opposite Davis and the chaplain.
     The chaplain looks at my empty cup and says something like “Don’t forget your drink.” He’s hard to hear over the music playing from the speakers in the ceiling.
     “I’m not that thirsty.” I pull three slips of paper from my breast pocket, unfold them on the table, and start reading.
     “Don’t you have those memorized yet?” Davis asks, sipping his drink.
     “Yes,” I say.
     I’ve read these scripts a hundred times already, but this gives me something to do while we wait. All morning I’ve been waiting to deliver my first notification, but the PNOK, that’s Primary Next of Kin, hasn’t been home.

James McCachren
from MEETING

     On the same evening Randy Houser, an English instructor at Seagrove Community College, was appointed chair of the Faculty Projects Initiatives Committee, Dr. Rajeev Ravindranath, physics professor, hung a scimitar over the office door of a colleague. On the end of the blade, Ravindranath stuck a note that read Such agan, Joyner, if you try it, though you won’t be such the fool as beyond the cold steel paring of this you’d see. Try me. The two events, Houser’s chairmanship and the note, were connected in an unfortunate way.

TRANSLATIONS

Tomas Tranströmer
translated from the Swedish
by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl

from THE SORROW GONDOLA (NO. 2)
I.
Two old men, a father-in-law and a son-in-law – Liszt and      Wagner – live near Canale Grand
along with the restless woman who married King Midas
the man who turns everything he touches into Wagner.
The green chill of the sea rises through the palace floor.
Wagner is marked, the familiar Mr. Punch profile grown      weary, the face a white flag.
The gondola is overloaded with their lives, two round-
     trips and a one-way.

Alexy Kholodov
translated from the Russian by Mark Halperin
from THE WAY I WILL NOT SEE YOU

     He lived in an expensive room in the famous hotel at the foot of the mountains, within three-hundred meters of the sea. Half a year had passed since the day he learned he would soon go blind. Descending degeneration of the nerve fiber without the presence of apparent inflammations of the eye. Slight hazing, sensations of oscillating curtain before the eyes. Gradual concentric contraction of field of view . . . And although his future was now defined by this entry on a hospital card, the difficult words of the name of the illness were simply a conglomeration of alliterations and hiatuses to him. There was no way he could connect them with his eyes and what was bound to happen to them quite soon.
     When they had told him about it, thousands of colors poured over him. The world appeared clear and blameless. He recalled the streetlamp in the yard where he’d spent his childhood, the first and last rays of the sun on the wall of the house across the way. At twilight, its pale gray city color changed to violet in a matter of minutes. That happened only on sunny winter days, and then you had to stand like a real hunter to catch this shade. The body of a loved woman and the light of those last minutes before the sun comes up. The air on a frosty morning, shadows in his room at daybreak in June, cliffs on the beach in his city – his teeth froze as if from the icy water at the color of these stones. All of this remained to be set down, as it had forty years ago, when, with pencil and brush, he first tried to deal with the world’s intangibility.

Umberto Saba
translated from the Italian
by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (4)

My childhood was poor and blessed
with few friends, some animals,
an aunt who was kind and loved like
a mother, and in heaven eternal God.

At night, half my pillow was left
free for my guardian angel;
never again would I dream of his dear form
after the first sweetness of the flesh.

It was a cause of irresistible giggling
to my schoolmates, and of wild excitement
to me, when I read my poems in school

among the whistles, cat-calls, animal-like groans;
I can see myself in that hellish pit, and alone
hear an inward voice saying “bravo.”