Month: April 2015

Out Past Where the Mangroves End

By Laura Baber

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My name is Sunditi Desai and I am dead. I did not know it, not at first, when I woke to the natural up and down rhythm of the boat on the river. I am the daughter and grand-daughter of fishermen; the neighbor, wife and mother of fishermen. Waking up out here alone didn’t seem so strange to me. It was only when I lifted myself up on the red edged corners of the canoe, and the fancy jewelry we saved for death and marriages bobbed against my earlobes and wrists, did I begin to know the truth of it. I’m 86 years old. I wasn’t getting married.

I rubbed my thumb against the gold bracelets that wrapped around my arms; followed the silver embroidery of a bright white sari I’d never owned; traced the dark spray of moles on the skin of my forearm.

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Elements

By Kim Peter Kovac

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We like to think we’re built of major, minor, and trace elements, which use DNA as the recipe to mix and combine in patterns to make blood, bones, organs, skin,and such. Wrong. We are made of words. Words are in us from birth. As we grow, words take on meanings, so they can be combined and recombined indifferent patterns. Phrases and later sentences lock together, shaping how we move through our lives, more as architecture than language. Some of our words look inward and some outward, and we need a full complement of each. If some inward words are missing, we are incomplete. If some outward words are missing, there are gaps in our connections with others and these gaps are the distances between us.

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Why

By Siamak Vossooughi

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     The way that a single man carries the human race is a mystery. Some men carry it so closely that they have a place to put the catastrophes of human behavior when they come their way. They have a place for them in their body and on their face.

     When the newspaper told Kamal Abdi in the morning of Nicaraguans killed or Salvadorans killed or Palestinians killed, he would make a place for them inside him. It was what he had always done. You started with the premise that the space you could make for them was infinite. Until human beings got it right, that was what it had to be.

     On Saturday mornings, something very bright and alive would happen. On those days, he would not have to make a place for them inside him because he would have breakfast with his son.

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In the Room

By Jenny Williamson

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It is more than a shadow over my face.

It is my own skull rising out of my skin
in slow motion;
the years piled up in the yard like slaughtered wolves.

Sometimes I catch my death
in the corner of my left eye
and trap it behind a contact lens.

Other times it will not be contained.
Some days it insists on itself
to anyone who will pay attention.

In the last room, I want it to be you.
Bring me a sprig of pussywillow
and all you ever were, in manuscript form.

I will be the old woman
clasping the limp word-corpse of some dead poet
tight to my chest, the smoke of my last burnt offering
rising from my mouth.

Jenny Williamson

*This piece was originally published by 24Mag


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