I visited some fish
in a manmade pond each
a swimming body a mouth
opening and closing a tail
steering the muscle of self
through shallow waters
One small white fish leaped up
twice into air then vanished
back under
Two narrow yellow fish
hiding within a rocky shelter darted out
for brief glimpses
The whole dark surface aswim
with purple blue orange
speckled contrasting bodies rippled
at my feet reflecting light churned
by the fish…
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Lumped even before the liftoff my prayers take their bonnets off and bang their sketchy heads against the mirror. You’ve come here alone, you will die here alone.
Here alone—but I believe in heaven. Remain in love with him who finds no door out of drowning. Wait in the entrance of a cinema to watch nothing, with no one.
At 10 AM I remind a child crossing the snow-eaten street to hold the hand of his dead mother a breath-shaped figure with the trouble of being still walking beside him.
In the afternoon, a police operation leaves a dead dog behind. Bullet-twirled. A levitation. Only by looking at it I can tell the dog is no longer a dog so I take that thing that is not itself home the way you would put an exigent newborn back the distant crib, and then back the dream.…
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The boy had been born missing a hand, on the left side. But, since he was born without it, there was nothing for him to miss and he’d never know otherwise.
He’ll figure it out, everyone told the parents, and though they knew he would, the mother wept knowing how cruel children could be and the father cried for all the girls he’d love, knowing that, save the special one, they would all fail to return his affections.
His mother loved him like any other mother would love a child, probably more to make up for the part that he was missing. He was too young to see the stares or hear the whispers but the mother saw them and died inside a little each time.…
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You worked as web editor and reporter on UK events for The Epoch Times, English edition, and worked with the White Cloud Poetry Society. Please tell readers about your additional background.
Reporting for The Epoch Times was good grounding for writing about news and current events: fact checking, strong sources for quotes and information, a balanced view, simple sentences, transparency. Truth was and is paramount to its work.
For White Cloud Poetry Society, Jennifer Zeng translates poems of Xi Yuan into clear English, keeping close to the original and kindly gives me a character-for-word check. I finish the poems into rhymed and metered English, focusing on the original structure, characters per line, rhyme, and the features that Jennifer brings out. Xi Yuan is outstanding in her evocation of traditional Chinese poetry.…
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“Yorba, yorba ,” his aunt yells from the back row of the van. “It’s spelled with a J,” she says in English, “but said like Y.”
I nod but don’t turn from the window. I can no longer keep track of what language we are in – Hebrew, Yiddish, Hungarian. Even English sounds foreign at this point. All I know is that we are forever going yorba – left. Maybe it’s illegal to turn right in Israel.
We are driving to the Dead Sea. All week, David’s aunt, uncle, and cousins have been telling us we must see the Dead Sea. So on the last day of our visit, we set out in the morning from the rocky Mediterranean coast. The dripping bougainvillea reminds me of Southern California as do the highways signs, written in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, that use the same green metal and bold font as American ones.…
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Let wind music carry you in what direction it chooses,
whispering its howl against stung ears.
From behind, white streaks by at peripherals
as though you’re travelling backward through a starfield.
Feel your hair glossed by highlights, damp, &
fresh melt grooving your cheeks where tears might rest.
Take this tranquil journey in a.m. dark,
if only a few feet to fetch the paper.
Pause. Now, look up at the arc lamp
where you’ll see it best: tickertape for your brief parade,
loose confetti, a dazzling haze of glitter.
You can take both calm & chaos with you
indoors to observe through a window
as the verdant flaming undergrowth disappears.
– Ace Boggess…
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Jen McConnell is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has most recently appeared in Buck Off Magazine, Luna Luna, Mused, and the Blue Lotus Review. Her debut collection of short stories, Welcome, Anybody, was published by Press 53 in 2012. She’s currently working on her second collection. She earned degrees in English and Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. Be sure to visit her website, too!
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with McConnell about her story “Yorba, Yorba,’ her MFA, publishing, and mentor experiences, and more!
– Jen McConnell…
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