SR2008

An excerpt from
To Body To Chicken
by Xu Xi

At each class, since she'd started these English lessons two months ago,
her weekly assignment was to use a new word in a sentence. The first two
weeks had been devoted to concrete nouns, and Teresa wondered whether
“oil” could be considered concrete, given its liquid state. To describe what
she did at work she said I help you push oil, which was how the industry's
language translated from Chinese, but the teacher suggested that “rub”
might be a better verb to use for “oil.” After four lessons, Teresa concluded
that English was nothing like in the dictionary.

But as she signed out of work that night, I body you echoed in her head. She
had wanted to ask the teacher earlier whether or not this was correct, but he
was generally so morose and stern that she felt questions were not very
welcome.

An excerpt from
A Spotless Marriage
by Mercedes Deambrosis, translated by Edward Gauvin

Their building seemed of a mediocre construction, but the neighborhood
had its possibilities, and if the apartment wasn’t as well-lit as she might
have liked—nothing put her in a better mood than a ray of sunshine—it was
undoubtedly quieter than the ones overlooking the street, where trams
passed with an appalling screech amidst a spray of sparks. But then there
was the slaughterhouse.

She’d had a word about it with her husband: after all, a married couple
should tell each other everything.

“The slaughterhouse scares me…”

He had laughed for a long time. And seeing him laugh that way, shaking
with laughter, bits of saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth, his jaw
strong and square, she didn’t think he looked like Victor Mature one bit.

What the Day Has Done
by R.T. Castleberry

As the sun recedes,
ranges long across grassy median,
turns tree shade to deepening shadows,
daylight's outline sheds definition,
snarls like snapped phone lines.
A chemical musk of herbicide and fertilizer
floats the wet ground.
People draw close to their homes,
halogen's fierce light flaring behind falling curtains.
Men and women shed their work skins
for Indian gin, video bondage,
unease around the dinner table.

I don't remember happiness.
I remember the graffiti sprawl of rent strikes,
tents on fire in Homestead Park,
beds without sheets, the beggar's canto.
I remember struggle.
This is a border ward—
near the harbor, near an artist's hostel.
Asian tailors, convenience stores, coffeehouses
fringe the nearby streets.
A cop ends his shift, furtive as a burglar.
Runner's colors flash a track
between construction crane and security wire.
I enjoy the daze of my neighbors,
their possibilities blank as stretched canvas.

My bookcases are filled
with biographies of willful musicians,
half-read anthologies of Absurdist theology,
volumes that chart the curse of coincidence.
An egoist’s ephemera lays heaped on a table:
Temper stick, coup stick, Monte Carlo dice.

At my desk, a PC screensaver rolls and spirals,
a Nikon N60 sits by the scanner.
Photos from four lovers
are framed in key corners of the house.
Through the upstairs windows
I can feel the light of a dingy silver moon
as it rises nightly from the mercury waves.
Summer is an empty menace.
Thunder rolls. The rain passes.

Daughter of the Vine
by Meredith Kunsa

Working each grape-row to its end
she hummed an old hymn marking
the cadence of a hundred vines.
Come home, come home, calling

O sinner come home. Ache of her back,
stooping deep into the canes, twisting
the curved blade against a stubborn stem,
snipping heavy clusters clean.

Stakes of redwood crosses weathered
gray stretched shoulder to shoulder.
She pulled a burlap sack on which I slept,
baby, hauled row to row under the canopy

of leaves, planted close to the root
of the vine. Dust now frosts my lips,
rests lightly on my tongue. Sky bleached
in yellow grit, smells of old sea

beneath these silted fields. Grapes
hang down in hard green bunches;
by September their sugar will be fleshed
and ready for picking.

In homage I say Faith, my middle name.
Though Grandmother no longer labors
in the field, she knew what I would need,
and that is what I’ve come to claim.