When I was a little girl, I never learned to crawl. I learned to walk and then I learned to fly. My parents were very proud of me. They said, Go far, but watch for sharp winds from the East. So I would leave my home and go everywhere. I would go west where it was warmer and south where it was drier, and up a long way until I got cold. I have seen islands and I have seen deserts. I like them all but I like meadows the best, especially in winter when they turn flaxen and silver. I can see trails of vole urine like neon, and although the world is big and all mine, in the distance the mountains are like the sides of a crib of the earth to hold me.…
Dear Suki: Winter, Hanoi, 40’s, I alone knew how everywhere was dark plaiting through salt- plume, dearing your thousand griefs into buds, tinsel-winged upon the tails of December sun. You freckled seeking over earth, keening quiet cries with caress smooth from my slight of turn, wrist to radius stretching there to everything you had loved that remained seam-like, straight to the end of memory. Ten weeks, they had said, ten weeks to fall from still stone steps for vertigo, descending hazy as though each limb prostrate in nocturne, your mouth lotus-bulbed on my finger- tips to a stunning death of petals.
Vergil taught me
that death is when the wind sweeps up a body’s last breath.
My
high-school Latin class translated Vergil’s Aeneid.
Killing Dido, the Phoenician queen sentenced to love Aeneas, and then die, was
one of the passages most likely to be on the AP test. The class killed the
Phoenician queen off one by one as the teacher told each of us to translate a
chunk of lines. Dido, her breath a wisp withdrawing into the wind, was born to
Elysium by the goddess of rainbows. The monarchical death was relayed in
mumbles and utters of students who had not studied their vocabulary. I had
never experienced death; I hadn’t even purged my closet of dolls, crayons, or
my fifth-grade flute.
Six years
later, my aunt, Linda taught me that death is as indifferent and swift as a
passing pug’s fart.…
A text at 2 AM is universally
acknowledged as a booty call, but not so with Shawn. We had been texting since
midnight because as much as he would like to believe he’s a morning person,
we’re both night owls. It wasn’t anything too interesting, and by that I mean
not anything romantic or sexual. It never is with Shawn. His 2 AM text wasn’t
to ask to hook up with me. Instead, he wanted to cuddle.
Cuddling had not been an unusual occurrence for us, but about a month prior to this text, he said we probably shouldn’t do it anymore. So, I was ill prepared when he said he wanted to come over at that very moment to spend the night. With no other prospects in my dating life and it being Winter, I wasn’t exactly keeping up with things like shaving my legs.…
Claire pulled the tattered blanket
closer and watched the window covering snatch a wayward bit of wind. The canvas
whipped against the side of their tent in a slow dance, occasionally letting
the two metal edges of the zipper kiss each other before pulling them apart
again.
Flap.
Ding.
Flap.
If the entire tent were made of
zippers, then perhaps the resulting clamor would drown out the other sounds
coming across the water from the mainland. The sounds the people made when they
were running, the sounds they made when they were dying, and the deafening
silence afterwards that seemed loudest of all. The disease had taken over
everything. Only their small island seemed safe, but time was running out. Claire
pulled the blanket over her ears and focused on the window.…
Gila Green is a Canadian writer, editor, and EFL teacher. As the daughter of a Yemenite-Israeli father and an Ashkenazi-Canadian mother, she often writes about the immigrant experience, including dislocation, alienation, and racism. She spent time in South Africa before settling in Israel where she lives with her husband and five children. She is the author of White Zion, two adult novels (Passport Control and King of the Class), and her short works have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and anthologies. Her new young adult novel, No Entry, is forthcoming in 2019 and is the first in an environmental series. Please visit Gila here.
In this episode of ‘Cover to Cover with . . .,’ Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Green about the processes and political/social motivations for her recent publications, political correctness in the modern age, the joys of being an up-and-coming novelist, and many other things.…
In semblance of brittleness it stands still unbowed, dry reedy rod rising to burry crown revealing nothing even to breezes that demand it speak forth its cadence of parched crackles
still it stands confronting crisp winter staring in its bleak eye the season bent on bringing down lesser, larger limbs unfit to bear the strain of snow
still rigid unhostile in plain acceptance— this is being this is nothing more than being— its implied dare reach, seize, snap hints at the plunderer’s fate the bloodied hands forced open in the attack
Author’s Note: The poem emerged out of a workshop sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Chicago’s Lurie Garden. We were studying how the garden changed over the course of the year, and I was taken in by the plant know as the rattlesnake master.…
