SAND Issue 18 by SAND Journal

ISSUE 1 8

Based in Berlin, SAND is a nonprofit literary journal published twice a year by a team from the cityâ€™s international community. Featuring work by writers, translators, and artists from around the world, SAND seeks out fresh and underrepresented perspectives.

SAND Journal c/o Jake Schneider Willibald-Alexis-Str. 16 10965 Berlin Germany info@sandjournal.com www.sandjournal.com Connect with us for news and events: Facebook: SAND Journal Twitter: @sandjournal Instagram: @sandjournalberlin ISSN 2191-429X Published in Berlin Copyright © SAND Journal, November 2018 SAND e.V. is a registered nonprofit association (gemeinnütziger Verein) under German law. Designed by Bárbara Fonseca Printed in Latvia by Jelgavas Tipogrāfija Cover image: detail of “Still Life with Grapes” by Elina Bergmark Wiberg, 2017. Mixed media including soap, silicone, and legumes.

Jake Schneider

EDITOR’S NOTE AUNTS & ANCESTORS

This issue of SAND is filled with people on quests for their personal origins, people asking “who were they” to figure out “who am I.” Even when so many governments are trying to pause or rewind migration, when so many of us immigrants (in the broadest sense) would rather dodge the question of where we “really come from” and just be at home where we live, we find ourselves privately pondering “Where am I really from?” And when we start digging for facts, we get startled by complexity. Like us, each of our predecessors was connected not only vertically to their parents and children, but also horizontally, to cousins and entire communities. But we don’t give this context enough credit. We go looking for ancestors, only to find aunts. At fifteen, I had my own version of that quest at various archives in New York. It started by tracing the family of my great-great-grandfather Jacob Wolowitz, and branched out as I fast-forwarded through the microfilm. Soon I was collecting random Wolowitzes all over the Lower East Side, maybe distant relatives, maybe not: a tailor, an awning maker, a kosher butcher who once chopped off a customer’s index finger. A dozen of these forgotten aunts and uncles seemed to be waving at me from the Ws of each index reel. Then, minutes after I walked out of that twilit archive onto the sweaty Manhattan streets, the entire Northeast switched off like a lamp. Some trees had seized a power line, bringing down the grid and forcing us all to notice our context in the mayhem of the moment. I became part of a baffled crowd responding to the unforeseeable: trying to buy food, trying to cross the river. Why should I, struggling to get home in the erratic present, expect the past to stick to a script?

Family histories are full of such tangents. I could have considered the Wolowitzes quintessential examples of the American immigrant legend, with generations of hard work and assimilation culminating in my own comparative comfort. But nine years later, I abandoned that hundred-year ladder for better opportunities in Germany, where I started a fresh paper trail of visas and address registrations. In investigations of the more recent past, the wild card is usually human memory, not paperwork. The narrator of “The Memory Tree” finally meets someone in southern England who knew her long-lost mother – the missing link to her heritage “back in South Africa, or was it Namibia?” – but comes to question the witness’s state of mind. Meanwhile, the titular “Uncle of Things” (p. 84) is forgetting the details of his own varied life as a vagabond veteran, memories his niece tries to reconstruct from secondhand accounts. In her essay “The Plague Years” (p. 107), recalling the many members of her chosen family lost to AIDS in San Francisco, Joan Hawkins finds herself contemplating her own survival. Finally also in California, the narrator of C.M. Lindley’s story (p. 123) lives in her late aunt’s house, where she has a recurring dream of reliving the aunt’s grisly end. Again and again, the struggles of the living are distinct from, but linked to, those of the dead. And so inherited memories tend to mingle with present situations – as if through the portals of Guilherme Bergamini’s postcard collages (p. 77), which offer tantalizing glimpses of unidentified landscapes beside clearly postmarked correspondence. In “Sweet Blood” (p. 10), set in the Appalachian Mountains, Miss Suzelle believes that Esi, the Ghanaian-American protagonist, has an implicit kinship with the local African American ghosts – even if their forebears were abducted from West Africa in shackles, whereas her parents moved centuries later by choice. “I know you ain’t the same people, but you all come from the same place,” she says. Maybe so, but our ideas of ancestry are subjective: culture counts for more than any DNA test. “Call these / my mountains / recollected etc.,” writes MC Hyland in a poem (p. 28) that recalls its own poetic ancestor. “The real story just / here yellowing / paper.” José Trejo-Maya’s poem (p. 93) is shaped like the cenote it invokes – a type of watery cavern on Mexico’s Caribbean coast best known for preserving ancient artifacts and even human remains – and is titled in the poet’s ancestral Nahuatl. As it plunges, the text broadens to embrace

cultural aunts and uncles: references to broader indigenous America (Maya, Lakota) that circulate like cave fish in the murky waters of the poem. Near the end, there is one line in colonial Spanish: “los abuelos cicatrizados en las venas” – the ancestors scarred in [our] veins. To bear a scar, a person must survive to tell the tale. This is not about archeology; this is living culture. Other texts give us visions of an ahistorical present. Zou Jingzhi’s lyrical story “Green Vines” (p. 50), translated by Jeremy Tiang, is set at a labor camp during China’s Cultural Revolution, an icy landscape that seems to exist outside time. But when the frozen order is disturbed, the uprooted characters cannot carry on as before, responding to a new fragment of history. By contrast, a poem by the Berliner-by-choice Donna Stonecipher, embedded in another (p. 60) by her friend Eugene Ostashevsky, speaks to the sterility and rootlessness of urban space: “It was like slowly becoming aware one winter that there are new buildings going up all over your city, and then realizing that every single one of them is a hotel.” In Ostashevsky’s cosmopolitan commentary on this line, he gibes: “How things look transient to transients.” These writers hint at the consequences of forgetting, but their textual dialogue also shows the messy web of interactions that happen in any moment before it is archived, commemorated, or scoured for answers. “It always revolves luminously around an other, even if that other is our self, pointing in all directions,” writes Stonecipher in her own commentary on Ostashevsky (p. 81). Our origin quests slice dotted lines of meaning into a personal or ancestral past, but every past was just as vast and three-dimensional as our own present. Elina Bergmark Wiberg uses seeds – the same ones farmers have been sowing and harvesting and sowing again for millennia – to sculpt elastic objects that engage with agrarian and artistic traditions as well as modern materials and media. Glimpsing the seeds through the fruit’s synthetic skin, I remember that each vine is the child of just one grape, but that this parent grape was clustered among so many aunts and uncles, each with intertwining stories.

CONTENTS GAMBIT / SALVATOR Tolu Oloruntoba

BREAK-UP POEM Robyn Pickens

SWEET BLOOD Alex Luke

STRAY Alex Marsh

DARK FOREST Genevieve DeGuzman

THE HILDEGARD SEQUENCE Sarah Payne

from the CONCRETE DISASSEMBLE POEMS series Federico Federici

GREEN VINES TUNNEL #2 (STRANGE BALLOON ) Lawdenmarc Decamora

from the MOSCOW MEDITATIONS series Ekaterina Costa

Zou Jingzhi tr. by Jeremy Tiang 25

PIRATE RADIO, IF THERE'S STILL SUCH A THING Jason Wee

MC Hyland

Travis Dahlke

from HALF PIGEON, HALF PEACOCK Maren Kames tr. by Bradley Schmidt

HULLS LINES COMPOSED WHILE READING "TINTERN ABBEY "

THE FLOWER Anne Gorrick

COMMENTARY TO DONNA STONECIPHER'S "MODEL CITY (1. )" Eugene Ostashevsky

"SELF-PORTRAIT " 3

ART SECTION

Šime Knežević

Elina Bergmark Wiberg Shayma Idris Tarek Al-Shamma Guilherme Bergamini

COMMENTARY TO EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY'S "FEELING SONNET 4" Donna Stonecipher

UNCLE OF THINGS Alexis Smiley Smith

SPINE INCIDENTAL Ollie Tong

THE MEMORY TREE Blessing Musariri

from the MOSCOW MEDITATIONS series Ekaterina Costa

SANDALS Wendy Lotterman

Joan Hawkins

AT 10:00 P.M. Shanita Bigelow 81

from FROM A WINTER NOTEBOOK Matvei Yankelevich

[YEI OZOMATLI HUEYTOZOZTLI NAHUI TECPATL ] Jose Trejo Maya

THE PLAGUE YEARS

HOW TO WRITE A LOVE LETTER (NOTES) Elizabeth Allen

from the CONCRETE DISASSEMBLED POEMS series Federico Federici

FINE I ADMIT I AM BITTER 94

103

Logan February

IF YOU SHOULD TURN A LEMON SWEET C.M. Lindley

HOW WIDE IS THE SUN 105

Robyn Pickens

106

107

113

114

117

120

122

123

134

poetry

Tolu Oloruntoba

Gambit / Salvator The bronze Bonaventure Christ has a parka of snow on his shoulder today. Against the 8 am, long, suffering shadow, the gladiolus of his outstretch interrupts the lawn. I donâ€™t know, Christ, what should I do? Interrupt this bus.

Robyn Pickens

Break-up poem What if you start with that: the hole in your throat after breaking up. Set the margins at 2.5 on either side because you need space. I cannot remember the past. It is the 14th moon tonight (tell me what that means). I spent the night rearranging dancers & gymnasts into patterns— overwrought poses, mannerist limbs, impossible flexibility. If I had a small mountain for every time you knew me as my own colour— kneeling at dawn amidst everyday things: an apple core (acidifying in the moon air), a paper dart (from you to me), a small digital clock (the gift I never should’ve given you). This is everything now. Nothing prepared me for Yerevan either. I’m kneeling in light with everyday strewn. The anonymous dancers have left & time is dangerous. There is only this leaking now, acidifying into a past I cannot rearrange.

fiction

Alex Luke

SWEET BLOOD With St. Clement’s Youth Group we did something for the needy every summer and winter break, and often I also did things in between. I volunteered at the annual food drive, and outside of church I always gave a dollar or a satsuma if I saw a homeless black man because, Mom told me, we must be kind to our own if nobody else will. The summer charity event was a weeklong trip to some crumbling Appalachian town. Thirty of us from St. Clement’s signed up this year, plus a bunch of kids from other churches across Northern Virginia. We were divided into teams, each responsible for repairing one Impoverished American Home, each team made up of five high-school juniors and one adult team leader. Our impoverished home belonged to Miss Suzelle, who’d never really spoken much to any black person before, and when our team showed up at her trailer on the first day, she looked right past the others and grabbed both my hands in hers and said something like, “Tell me, sweetie, is it true you ladies sew other people’s hair onto your heads?” Our team leader was Terry Kirkpatrick, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver last spring. His job was to shuttle us in the minivan between Miss Suzelle’s trailer and base camp. He mused over blueprints and delegated responsibilities. First thing after introductions, he made us all stand in a circle and hold hands, so we could tell each other what we were thankful for. He got teary-eyed talking about his loved ones, and his health, and this opportunity to help others, like now that his kid was gone he had more gratitude to spare for everything else in his life. “We’ll start and end each day doing this,” he told us. When it was my turn to share I made sure not to list too many things in one go, in case I ran out by the end of the week. “We’re just so pumped to be here, aren’t we, folks?” said Terry, beaming at us and at Miss Suzelle. She was born and raised here in Dingess,

West Virginia. She was sixty-eight years old and the farthest she’d ever been from home was South Carolina. She told us she dreamt of seeing the cherry trees in Washington, DC, one day, and we all cooed in admiration for this simple woman and her simple dreams.

Base camp was a thirty-minute drive away, a middle school out for summer. We slept in classrooms with the desks pushed up against the wall, and I drifted off that first night reading titles on the battered spines of geography textbooks. Laura and I picked spots next to each other in the farthest corner from the door, which first felt like a good catch, like the way you rush for the back seat of the bus, but now to go to the bathroom after lights out we had to blindly pick our way through the shadows of bagged bodies and backpacks and piles of clothes. I woke up on Day Two mid-shiver, wriggled out of my sleeping bag, and held my arm up to the gray light. It was covered in tiny bumps. Beside me Laura shifted in her own bag, and I shoved my mutant arm out of sight. In the shower, I discovered my whole body had been ravaged, in the most unlikely places: behind my ears and between my fingers and bubbling out of the knobs along my spine. All over my legs – I traced them from one ankle up to my groin and back down to the other. More than forty; I lost count. The itch spread slowly as I examined myself, as if each bite only became real when I looked at it, as if by seeing them I’d willed them into existence. It means your blood is sweet, Mom always told me, if mosquitos like you.

In the minivan, Terry played a John Denver compilation CD and when “Take Me Home, Country Roads” came on, he slapped both hands against the steering wheel. His delight could not be contained. He cried, “Here we go gang! You ready to sing along?” Laura was on my team, plus Rory, Michael Yu, and Michael Elliot. I knew from how Rory sniggered and the Michaels pretended not to have heard that we wouldn’t be a team that sang along. Terry boomed the first verse, made this guttural throat-hole melody that couldn’t have come

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naturally, was maybe even painful, because by verse two he’d faltered and petered out into a half-hearted whistle. The road coiled meekly through forest and mountain that swelled in every direction and made us tiny. I loved this. To be tiny. I stuck my head out the window. It was muggy, it felt like you were sucking in the trees’ wet breath, and I knew that what I breathed back out was bloating the forest further. At some point we drove through Logan, a place built-up enough that once or twice we paused at a stop sign and found the buildings on either side of us had suddenly blocked out the mass of green that dwarfed and cradled the town. In those brief moments we might have been in any man-made place, on any patch of earth concreted into submission, except for the insects and leaves and the rushing water that hissed steady and scornful. By the time we came to the edge of the town it was already hard to imagine there’d ever been any interruption to the trees. Whoever built the road forgot to dig out the roots of what was here before, and now the wild had crept back in. The road crumbled under the weight of roots and branches that pushed from all angles; we edged around potholes, deep like some beast had gouged out fistfuls of tarmac. I dangled my hand out the window so the damp breeze might ease the itch of the bites on my fingers. To enter Dingess we passed through a tunnel, one lane wide, and nearly a mile long. Its mouth was a big black O in the rock. The temperature dropped as soon as we entered; the tunnel was dank and unlit, and Terry raised his voice against its maddening echo. This place, he said, was known for its ghosts; if you were quiet enough you might hear them whisper. The rock walls were slick with sweat, and I wondered how any voice could seep through that sticky wetness. The voices must come out hot and moss-fuzzy. They must have sour breath. “What do the ghosts say?” Michael Yu asked. Terry looked in the rear-view mirror, hoping, I guess, to catch Michael’s eye, but only I was watching. “They just say hi,” said Terry, and his voice had a quiet hilarity to it, mockingly hushed, like the guy at the beginning of the horror movie who doesn’t believe any of this is real. It took two long minutes to get to the other side. Miss Suzelle lived less than half a mile from the mouth, at the end of a long dirt track

SWEET BLOOD

with no streetlights, the forest and mountains to one side, grassy hillside dotted with trailers on the other. When we arrived on Day Two, she was waiting at the edge of her little plot of land with a pitcher of lemonade, calling out to us as the van shuddered to a halt: “Morning boys, morning Laura, morning Esi.” She faltered a little at my name. I told her, when I first introduced myself, it’s just like Jessie without the J. Mom would have cringed to hear me say this. When Mom and Pop want to take a cheap shot, they’ll make fun of my American accent. They mimic the length of my vowels: “Can I go to the mall, Maaahhhhm?” Their own Os are the short sharp sounds that are forced from your body when you’re slapped on the back. Mom. Pop.

Laura and I were the only two girls on our team, so Terry gave us all the easy jobs. The day rolled by, and all we did was measure things and hold other things still while the boys drilled holes into those things. Rory and the Michaels were transformed by these tools: they fought over the biggest, shiniest, sharpest ones; they competed over who could carry the most bags of cement. When I saw them on Saturdays at Youth Service they were boring, but here in this new setting it occurred to me that, if I had to go out with one of them, it’d probably be Rory. He’d gotten kind of lean and gangly this past year, in a good but funny way; limbs teased from the sockets, escaping his torso. He kept saying “That’s what she said,” but laughing at these jokes was getting tiring, because most of them I couldn’t link in my head to any sexual act. Laura and I were watching him dig a hole, and Laura said, “What happens if you hit a rock?” and Rory said, “That’s what she said!” and we all laughed. I hoped my laugh seemed unforced. Miss Suzelle dragged a rocking chair up to her front door and sat shadowed in the frame, knitting and watching us work. She was squat with sun-reddened rolls of flesh that spilled from the hem of her cotton dress. Her little legs barely reached the ground and she kicked them like a child on a swing, trying to shift her weight and steady the rhythm of the rocking. Sometime after lunch she saw me looking bored and called me into the shade to drink iced tea, which was kind of uncomfortable, kind of a relief. My ankles itched. The heat was heavy. I dropped my tools and

Alex Luke

flopped down beside her. Terry bristled, but he couldn’t say anything: we were supposed to foster relationships with the homeowners; it said so in the program. Miss Suzelle topped up my glass and told me that my hair – such lovely long braids, so exotic – was very pretty, really suited to my face. Question by question she sketched out the ways we were different: she had ten brothers and sisters, I had none. She liked floral patterns, I wore (these days) almost only black. She never even went to high school, and I knew I’d need to get at least two degrees to satisfy my parents. “And as an African American—” Here I cut her off, like Mom always drilled me to do: I was not an African American. My parents were both Ghanaian, which made me an African who just happened to live in America. When Miss Suzelle heard this, her eyes widened in her skull. She’d seen Africa in documentaries, she told me.

By Day Three, planks lay scattered across the lawn, and soon they would be hammered into something substantial. Terry sent Laura and me up to the trailer’s tin roof to seal up holes with a caulk gun – we were smaller and more agile than the boys. “See, we’re lucky to have these little ladies on our team!” he said, slapping both Michaels on the back. “You great lumps wouldn’t be any good up there.” It’d rained hard during the night. Now, under the midday sun, big dumb bugs hurled themselves at the silver metal roof, thudding against it, landing in the shallow grooves where puddles of rainwater sat steaming, and they drowned or burned, whichever happened first. Up on our tin throne, Laura and I rated Rory and the Michaels in terms of looks, sense of humour, intelligence, etc.; we hypothesised about which of them had the biggest dick. At breakfast, everyone had been whispering about this girl from another team who had snuck out at night with one of the guys who lived in her Impoverished American Home. Laura wished we’d gotten assigned to that kind of home. Miss Suzelle was sweet and whatever, but also super creepy in the way that old people mostly are. “Plus,” Laura said, “it’s kind of awkward, the way she keeps, like, favoring you.” I focused on the oozing caulk.

SWEET BLOOD

When I was seven or eight, Ghana played the US in the World Cup, and the Kirkpatricks invited my family over to watch the match. This was the only time we’d ever interacted outside of church, so when Emily Kirkpatrick died last year, I thought back hard on this day, trying to distinguish her from the other Kirkpatrick girls. Terry and his wife, whose name I always forgot, had four daughters. The youngest one was still older than me by a few years, and they were all broad-shouldered with white-blonde hair, which made them seem sturdy from some angles and delicate from others. One of them was markedly prettier than the others, but Emily wasn’t that one, and in my head the others had always blurred together in that realm of almost-loveliness by virtue of being so blonde. During the match, Terry’s girls had sat next to each other, crosslegged on the carpet. Whenever the US team did something stupid, Terry would bark, “Girls! Where’d he go wrong?” or “Girls! How do we defend a corner?” And the girls would all chorus, “Man-marking, Daddy,” or something like that. My mom brought fried plantains, and I spent the whole match focusing on how to keep eating the plantains without drawing attention to the fact that I was the one eating all the plantains. My reactions to the game were all a second delayed. Ghana scored, and then the US, and Terry roared with joy. “We might not be able to match that strength, girls, but we’ve got the smarts, am I right?” Minutes from the end, Ghana scored again, which meant we qualified for the next round and the US didn’t. On the walk home, Mom said, “What a lovely family,” but I knew she felt smug too.

Terry used to be a dentist, but he stopped working when Emily died and never started again. At least one of the Kirkpatrick girls had kids of her own by now, and Terry seemed like he was softening into a real grandad – his shoulders sloped more gently. He called us down to break for lunch, and I moved slow while Laura held the ladder steady at the top; it hurt my swollen fingers to grip each rung.

Alex Luke

Rory and the Michaels were sprawled on the grass a little ways away from the trailer. They ate slices of pizza and glugged down Coke from plastic bottles, and the thought of fizz and grease inside me made me sick. I held back as Laura joined them, glanced over at Miss Suzelle. She was still sitting in that rocking chair, still knitting, eyes ready to meet mine. She didn’t seem surprised that I came to sit by her. Terry yelled that we ought to hurry if we wanted any pizza, and we both pretended we hadn’t heard. “I was wondering,” she asked softly, conspiratorially, “about the men?’ I plucked at the loose hairs at the tip of a braid. “What about them?” I said. “Which men?” But I knew which men. Down on the lawn, Rory snatched a pizza slice from Laura’s hand and took a wolfish bite. She punched him in the arm, and they both laughed, he with cheese between his teeth. I told Miss Suzelle that African men were bold, and I said this word with purpose, though I’d never used it to describe any real person. The last time I’d been to Ghana I was twelve. We’d visited an endless stream of aunties and uncles, and I couldn’t keep up with the Fante they spoke. My cousin Edward had waved his iPhone in my face and said “You Americans think we don’t get shit like this here. You think we’re all backwards.” Miss Suzelle’s family had mined coal for generations. She had loved men, she told me, who’d blown holes in these mountains and swallowed so much of the dust in the rock that their lungs had blackened and failed. She said she herself most likely had mountain dust inside her. But still, that evening, holding my puffy hand tight, she told the circle she was grateful for the mountains. Rory said, “I’m grateful for pizza,” and I said, “Me too,” and Terry looked like he wanted to say that wasn’t allowed. I knew, of course, how a place could get inside you and stake its claim, but I’d never seen this work as neatly as it did with Miss Suzelle. You could overlap her life onto her parents’ lives and then onto their parents’ lives, and the whole story would play out on the same land. Even the land itself was the same way it’d been for generations. The Dingess Tunnel was over a hundred years old and still had no lights, still only let one car pass at a time. They’d built it, she told me, so trains could cut through the mountain and make Mingo County and its coal a functioning part of the world. When she was a kid, in the 1960s,

SWEET BLOOD

she watched men rip out the railroad tracks like stitches so cars could use the road; her second husband had died by the time they paved it. She’d lost a childhood puppy in that tunnel, and I wondered but didn’t ask if she still heard it howl. She’d watched her nephews race through on their bikes, shrieking to see how big the echo would get. She’d lost her first husband “to the devil,” which I figured meant drugs, and he’d crawled into the tunnel to die. She herself had driven through thousands of times, back and forth and back again.

That evening, as we left for base camp, Terry seemed restless and revved the engine, and we rammed into the tunnel like we were trying to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere. My ears popped, and from the rock came girlish voices, hi, hi, hi, like maybe they were talking over us, bouncing between the walls, a hundred small voices or maybe one whose depth was revealed as each hi layered upon the last, until the noise was just one shapeless boom. And even if Terry made no sign that he heard, I felt sure it was all for him, because who would have anything to say to us, except our own dead? Your ghosts must follow you, waiting to find you in places like this, where the border between worlds was worn thin. That slope in Terry’s shoulders; the weight of Emily, always. And now she clamoured at these wet rock walls and whispered hi, hi, hi. Terry’s loss had been disruptive. The Kirkpatrick girls were all already too old for Youth Group when it happened, so this turned into the place we could share the rumors we’d heard from our parents. There was the time, Michael E. told us, that Terry turned up drunk to Bible study. Or the other weird incident, when he drove down to Emily’s old college and sat outside her dorm until campus security made him leave. He sent streams of barely coherent emails to her friends, begging to know the details of her life he hadn’t had access to. For almost a year, the congregation felt his madness at its periphery, but the other Kirkpatricks stayed stoic and pale as always. Some time after we stopped paying attention, Terry became quietly clean and new. He stopped drinking entirely, got more involved with the church. His smiles held a measured sort of peacefulness. When we came through the end of the tunnel, Laura let loose a mad

Alex Luke

giggle, and I suddenly felt the silence we’d let build, noticed each of us quietly unclench our fists and breathe out what we’d been holding in.

The bites had been neat and small, and running my fingers across them felt like reading braille, but now they swelled beneath their puncture points like budding breasts – except not awkward and delicate like a girl’s growth is; these lumps were cyst-like, ballooning out of my bony joints, weird and bulbous and stinging. That night, before bed, I used the flickers of functioning internet to look up DIY treatments, and before breakfast the next morning I tried different methods on different body parts. I pressed little crosses with my thumbnail onto the bites on my inner thigh. For my stomach I poured hot water over a spoon and held the metal against my skin, but this was stupid – it just burned. All morning, I couldn’t stop fingering the new shape of my face; its outlines looked drawn by an unsteady hand. We climbed into the van, and Laura said, “Stop picking your chin,” and I said, “It’s my fucking chin, what the fuck do you care if I pick it?”

Once the week was up, another team from another church would come and take over, and on and on until summer ended and the trailer was repaired and extended. I spent whole days sitting by Miss Suzelle, watching the Michaels sword fight with spades as Terry’s schedule fell to pieces. Generally, I’d noticed, people asked questions thinking they already knew the answer, but Miss Suzelle knew nothing at all and she saw this in herself. She didn’t really use the internet, and I wondered whether this was what made her listen harder: everything I said was a thing I was teaching her, that she couldn’t find out from anyone else. When she asked me about “home,” I thought of the boys at school who swore they were princes in their villages in Nigeria. “We travel a lot,” I said. I listed trips I’d taken: to Rome, with my Latin class; Dresden, to visit an uncle; Sydney, the one time we got to join Pop on a work trip. Miss Suzelle made me describe each city in great detail.

SWEET BLOOD

She cared most about the men, and the kinds of trees that grew in each place. “Tall,” I said. Or, “Gentle, elegant.” “And do you go back home much?” Ghana we’d visited a few times. I told Miss Suzelle about my grandparents’ house, with its swimming pool and house boy. If she ever went there, kids would yell oburoni at her as she shuffled, stiff-limbed, through the markets. If she sat to rest they’d swarm and stroke her hair and finger the places where her pink scalp shone through. Of course, she’d never go. The day was nearly over, and Rory leant nonchalant against the van, listening to his iPod. Laura moved towards him, and he offered her an earbud. Michael Elliot and Terry were carefully painting a wooden pole stuck in the grass whose function I couldn’t work out. “You like it?” Terry called over, watching us watching them. “Oh, it’s wonderful!” Miss Suzelle shouted back. “Real pretty.” We lapsed back into silence. Terry’s gray t-shirt clung to his sweatsoaked back, so we could see the way his spine was bent in resignation to some unseen load. He’d been taller before, I was certain. I wondered if it’d shrink Mom and Dad, to lose me. “There are ghosts in the tunnel, right?” I said to Miss Suzelle, and I guess I’d hoped this would impress her, the way I understood even this space and history that was hers. But she nodded gravely. She wasn’t surprised. “I knew you’d be the one to hear ’em,” she said. “I know you ain’t the same people, but you all come from the same place.” They’d been brought in as labor, by the truckload, she told me; they’d been the ones who’d cleaved at the side of the mountains and put down the tracks. Her granddaddy’s daddy had fought to keep them out, keep the land how they knew it; he’d hidden with his friends and neighbors between the trees, pointed shotguns at dark faces as they rode in on the backs of carts. Those were the first bodies to litter the tunnel, hundreds of them, and they spoke to you, but they said so little it made you wonder what had ever been in their heads in the first place. Miss Suzelle had been sure, she said, that I’d feel that connection. I peeled off one sweat-dampened sock and rolled up the leg of my jeans. I blinked at the alien limb throbbing inside. In my sleep I’d scratched myself raw. It’d stung when I’d tried to cream my skin this

Alex Luke

morning, so I’d stopped, and now the glistening open heads of bites looked even more hideous, erupting out of the dry white scales on my shins and kneecaps. “Well, they’re making a real feast out of you!” said Miss Suzelle. Then, thoughtfully, “Do you all have such sweet blood?”

In the evening circle, we got ready to unburden ourselves of our gratitude. We had two days to go, and the roof was watertight. The polymer skeleton of the front porch stood erect with all the glory of a monument, silhouetted against the lights inside the trailer. I thought, how strange to have made something so big, and so functional, so much more solid and real than the things we normally created (essays, group chats, basic pasta dishes). Laura tied a knot at the end of her hoodie sleeve and offered me the fabric stump, so she didn’t have to touch the bites on my knuckles and fingertips. On my other side, Terry Kirkpatrick clasped my hand, and his sweat-softened palm lay flat against mine. He’d be thankful, probably, for the weather that had cleared up in time for us to get a good day’s work done. I pulled free. “I don’t feel like it,” I said. I heard myself, sullen like a child. Terry reached for my hand again and I moved it quick behind my back. Laura and Rory and the Michaels were quiet. “I’ll wait in the van,” I said. Something flashed across Terry’s face before the gentleness set back in. “Come on, Esi,” he said. “It’s important we take this moment every day, just to touch base. If you’ve had a rough day, that’s okay. This’ll give you a chance to focus on the parts that weren’t so rough.” “Did your therapist teach you that?” I said, and I saw I’d touched someplace I hadn’t meant to, I’d scraped something tender, and it felt strange that I could find that place in him at all. That I’d had this power in me the whole time. I kept my eyes hard. “I’ll wait in the van,” I said again.

There would most likely be fish stew on the stove when I got home. After supper, Mom would dab gently at each bite with antiseptic wipes

SWEET BLOOD

and scold me for letting it get this bad. I’d spend whole days lying in bed waiting to heal. The others were silent when they got into the van. Terry didn’t put on any music. I let myself wonder if I was the root of the tension. I knew everyone was just tired. Miss Suzelle knocked on the window and waved goodbye. We eased down the dirt path and turned onto the main road, into the tunnel, and it whispered hi, hi, hi, not girlish at all, just hoarse and ancient. Emily Kirkpatrick wouldn’t haunt the same space as these men. Black hands had carved out this hole and bricked its edges to neaten the wound. My own hands lay spread on my lap, and when they sealed the leaks in that tin roof it was for charity. At the far end of the tunnel, a coal truck appeared. Its girth blocked the light behind it. “What does this chump think he’s doing,” muttered Terry. Then, louder, as if to the truck itself, “We entered first, buddy! You’d better back up!” The truck flashed its headlights at us. Terry slowed, uncertain. We were almost halfway through the tunnel. I heard its ghosts in the metallic ringing in my ears. The coal truck blared a noise too big for this space, a sound like the hot-breathed bellow of a giant. Its force might have wrenched loose our wheels and sent us spinning backwards, even without Terry’s consent. “Maybe we should back up, Terry,” said Michael Yu. “It’s cool, it’ll take like thirty seconds,” said Rory. Terry switched off the engine. The back of his neck turned a violent, comical red. The coal truck did not brake until we stood nose to nose, like before a kiss or a headbutt. “We entered first,” Terry said again. “That’s how this works. The rules don’t just change for you if you’re driving a bigger vehicle.” This felt like demanding justice from something vast and unmoving, like asking the mountain itself to follow fair rules. “Are you fucking kidding me?” muttered Laura. Under her exasperation was the quiet thrill of knowing how we’d tell this story when we got back to base camp. “I am not MOVING this FUCKING—” But the coal truck’s horn blared again and made his anger puny. In the backseat we were frozen in uncertain silence. I knew I should

Alex Luke

SWEET BLOOD

find the kindness to reach out and squeeze a sloping shoulder, but I was tired in ways I couldn’t yet articulate. I said, slowly this time, “Back up the van, Terry.”

I noticed, as the van jerked backwards, that the itch was gone. The absence of sensation was so total that, with calm certainty, I thought: I have no body at all. This notion stayed with me for longer than you’d think; the length of time it took to make our slow retreat out the back end of the tunnel. Our eyes were all trained on the coal truck that inched along with us, as if attached by string, as if our strength kept it tethered and close. We emerged backlit by a deep red sun, and I turned to see if Miss Suzelle was watching, since I knew she could see the main road from her trailer, and here my body came back to me. In my stillness, the sores on my thighs had leaked pus that hardened against the stiff denim. Skin had fused with fabric until I shifted and ripped the two apart, and now the wounds wept fresh again.

poetry

Alex Marsh

Stray arising as a consequence of the laws of physics, but unwanted and usually having a detrimental effect on the operation of equipment

so much heaven gone into error & kept beside our body waterless some rundown too

we started home to go astray a core bond now reduced to fortunate frisk with pollen rock through sudden high me your mainstay in error became consequence of tender pixel our flicked prism became tent in wind outthere shining on like in motionsensitive Rex so tear as in strike so strickle

poetry

Sarah Payne

THE HILDEGARD SEQUENCE HILDEGARD ACCEPTS THE CALL That I was given the tools to survive That the noisy bowl has not yet closed over me That I wish in the early day to come up from my sleep Which are desertine days where this is the merest living Which was the only route possible, which other roads were death-bound roads At the market in Mainz, a tavern owner: I used to be an artist, and then I figured out how to survive. Artists put poison in their mouths. Now, I am a business man. Now, every day I close the money box with my key. Lights on cobalt tiles, his black hair and ochre skin Lightly music seeping into the yard If it is a wholecloth habit of survival If rapture is not-dying before getting it on

MIGRATION When I was small my parents made me, their youngest child, an oblate to the monks. I was a gift and in my bonding was presented back my fractioned self. That this should be your humor,

In the abbey, I studied many quiet years. I was ill, I recovered. But,

, did you put me into the world to rehearse what you already made?

When the sisters came to Disibodenberg, as we accrued, we enriched its ringing walls so then the brothers who stood above us became fearful, covetous and locked away the emeralds, gold, and tight-braided leathers of our dowries. , do you always call into the next sweep those like us whose mouths are dispossessed of their feeding? We left the abbey. At Rupertsberg we built a home by the Light of eagles you sent to occlude my sight and peck my heels we built it smart and fine.

Sarah Payne

The garden white with yarrow, the halls ran with tonics and letters, our slow beat. And your word was in our livers,

We passed long and measured days, spent them out, met the dead. Then younger hands washed our ultimate bodies, possessed the buildings, as they will and have. They tell us one day our zion was burned by men at war for thirty years. Tell St. Peter, : I am going out to haunt its field. Say theyâ€™ll know me by the hot and sparking rubies in my eyes.

THE HILDEGARD SEQUENCE

THE EMPEROR FREDERICK I BARBAROSSA ASKS FOR A MEETING WITH HILDEGARD, AND SHE GOES I am God’s exile. The country of my understanding was forbidden when I came here: the musicians made unknown noises and the food was sourly fermented according to the regional custom. The wind dry and smelling of cold stones, in this city’s shadows smiles were ready as in the walks of our garden by the fifth hedge. Here I am called to speak over a powerful man in whose power my own increases: small things win sudden status. If you could see, Volmar, how I am like our kitchen cat, filthy and full of victory.

FEDERICO FEDERICI “Lapses” from the Concrete Disassembled Poems series, 2017

FEDERICO FEDERICI “Miniature Tone” from the Concrete Disassembled Poems series, 2017

fiction

Zou Jingzhi translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

GREEN VINES Because the Great Northern Waste was free of frost so little of the year, most crops wouldn’t thrive there. On the other hand, with the fertile soil and dramatic swings from hot to cold, anything that did survive would grow to be extraordinarily plump and flavorful. During the long winter (six months), our staple food (wheat flour) remained the same, and the side dishes seldom varied: potatoes and cabbages, boiled and fried, or fried and boiled. Through the entire season, the canteen menu scrawled on the chalkboard hardly ever needed to be altered. Of course, even cooked the same way, the ingredients occasionally changed. For instance, if a cow died, the vegetables would be served with beef. If a pig died – as long as it didn’t have swine pox – they would come with its rind, or fatty pork slices. But these were rare occurrences, because pigs and cows didn’t often die. Once, I ate some beef from a cow struck dead by lightning, but its flesh was tough and flavorless, meat only in name, its goodness zapped away by the electricity, like gnawing at wax. Old sows didn’t taste good either, bland and chewy as rubber. Still, it had to be eaten for the reassuring sensation of tasting meat, however loosely defined. There was that one time I got to enjoy some delicious veal. After I’d eaten, my schoolmate Lion Snout told me it was a young female, killed when a bull tried to mount her. That made me feel the cruelty behind the flavor, as if I’d been an accomplice to a crime. I cursed the blabbermouth. Why tell me something like that? Potato and cabbage were so important that, as soon as autumn arrived, we’d send teams out to quickly harvest them. Cart after cart would get unloaded into the storage cellar, and after thousands of root vegetables had gone through the narrow opening, our winter was secure. We could stay alive as long as these two staples kept appearing on our tables. The only alternative was a salty preserved vegetable known as “scare away

the guests.” If it had come to that, we’d have ended up as shriveled as the radishes in the pickle vat. Vegetable cellars were crucial in our lives, but at the time, most divisions didn’t have a decent one, probably because of the belief that revolution was more important than life, and that the harder your existence, the closer you were to the revolution. After all those excellent potatoes and cabbages were harvested, if they weren’t put away in time, the snow would arrive and they’d end up frozen solid, at which point, the only recipe left was to prise one free with a pickax, thaw it, boil it, serve it. Even the greatest imagination couldn’t make these dishes taste anything but acrid. Neither the joy nor suffering of life was discernible in them any longer. As we went through the process of being rehabilitated, us Educated Youths became increasingly aware of the need for a vegetable cellar, eventually accepting that eating unfrozen potatoes without beef might not be harmful to the revolution. And so we’d dig a deep, wide pit, hastily shoveling the vegetables in and putting a roof over them before the snow arrived. After that, you’d often see the duty cook climbing down into the cellar, emerging with basket after basket of unfrozen potatoes or cabbages, a sight that made us feel life was good and under control. These cellars had other uses, though we only discovered this after the incident. I just went down a few times, when I was called upon to assist the cooks. There was an electric light that, when turned on, illuminated the potatoes’ and cabbages’ peaceful faces. There was no wind or snow down here, but it wasn’t hot, and the air was thick with decay. Your hand had the power to choose, and all these vegetables, imprisoned so long, would glare at you coldly. A person picking the next victim to be eaten cannot expect a warm welcome in a vegetable cellar. I couldn’t feel good down there, no matter how much it added to our existence. It felt like a dungeon full of lives I’d never get to know. Camp Three, Eighteenth Company, was a small group, so naturally their cellar was small and cozy too. At the time, dalliances between Educated Youths rarely progressed beyond a spiritual level, partly because love was forbidden, but even more because we had no opportunity to so much as talk. Every division had hundreds of eyes looking out for this sort of thing – imagine being romantic under such scrutiny! Courage wasn’t enough. And so most relationships took place under conditions

Zou Jingzhi

GREEN VINES

of great secrecy, like working undercover, carried out through facial expressions and code words, or even more often, when forcibly separated, by thought alone. Love like this carried the intensity of suffering, so every second together was worth a thousand pieces of gold. Most people found themselves like bows stretched to breaking point. Love stimulates the mind. One couple thought of using the cellar: the boy was an Educated Youth from Tianjin, a platoon leader in our company, normally dignified and severe. The girl was from Tianjin too, unruffled and soft-spoken, of average appearance. Before this happened, no one had any idea they were together (up till then, I’d thought it would take superhuman ability to conceal love, but the Cultural Revolution produced just such superhumans). I don’t know how often they met there – when I get to this part, I think of Juliet’s tomb. We found their naked bodies in the cellar. The girl was a little closer to the entrance, as if she’d struggled to get out. The boy probably died faster, gloriously, no suffering on his face. In the midst of so many vegetables, they looked like stage props, or perhaps sculptures, left where they were, alone or maybe connected. Their souls lay scattered amongst those silent winter vegetables. We dragged their corpses from the warm cellar. I don’t know why none of us thought of putting clothes on them, so their pale bodies flopped out naked against the snow, not moving, black hair spreading over the white ground, only the tiny hairs on their bodies stirring in the wind – signal flags sending a last message. They shouldn’t have lit a coal-burning stove in the enclosed space. Even after all these years, I often recall this incident and find myself imagining the loving scenes I didn’t actually witness. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps deaths like these, beautiful as art, shouldn’t cause regret or sadness. Which of us is fit to feel pity? The entire company refused to eat the stored vegetables, perhaps afraid of stirring something up. In fact, they refused to go near the cellar altogether, so it fell into disuse and caved in. That spring, the buried potatoes sprouted, sending vines up through the soil, a patch of bright green.

poetry

Jason Wee

Pirate Radio, If There’s Still Such a Thing Signal strength failing in nights of electric snow. I’m not sad, just breached. Behind familiar things, washed porcelain and salt, a keen hate, gas leak. Every podcast the host ums before he begins his final question. The arc of the evening nearly always departs from symmetry. The way slimy hairies with legs do not crawl upon the same sea twice. A dent in the steel when washed in steaming water resumes its smooth face. Who is the guest quoting? A paraphrase, my brain answers. But of who? I don’t mean to survive the morning, but I tend to repeat myself.

art

ELINA BERGMARK WIBERG SHAYMA IDRIS TAREK SEBASTIAN AL-SHAMMA

GUILHERME BERGAMINI

ELINA BERGMARK WIBERG “Grazing cattle on a pasture (A composition for the Milkmaid),” 2018 Elina Bergmark Wiberg borrows and mimics ideas, techniques, and characters from art history as a strategy to create both direct and indirect links to people and movements. In her piece “Grazing cattle on a pasture (A composition for the Milkmaid)” the partly fictional persona of the Milkmaid is presented through a slightly banal and romanticised idea of her natural habitat. The sculpture explores the extension of drawing as a gesture, both on a formal and a contextual level. Through her choice of materials, including soap, silicone, grain, and legumes, she moves towards a rather sentimental approach to making and thinking.

ELINA BERGMARK WIBERG “Grazing cattle on a pasture (A composition for the Milkmaid),” 2018

ELINA BERGMARK WIBERG “Still Life with Vases,” 2017

poetry

Robyn Pickens

How wide is the sun? Life is a song we play to each other with varying degrees of resolution. These might be our fruits offered across bracken, silicon & gullies. In rooms & open spaces & shadows our main sequence of days open & close. Even stars die. I read that it took 12,000 shellfish to dye one toga purple. Someoneâ€™s at the sea fringe counting, raw-knuckled, queuing for ice cream. We live halfway through the life of the sun in open melt.

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Contributors

tarek sebastian al-shamma is a self-taught artist born in London to French and Iraqi parents. The work is his personal reflection on history, migration, culture, East, West, death, and sex. He has had several solo shows in Britain and is part of collections in Singapore, Los Angeles, and London. elizabeth allen writes in Sydney and works as a bookseller at Gleebooks. Her poetry, short fiction, and literary criticism have found frequent publication in many well-respected journals and anthologies. The author of two full-length collections of poetry, Body Language (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Present (Vagabond Press, 2017), Elizabeth won the Dame Leonie Kramer Prize in 2001 and the Anne Elder Award in 2012. She has recently completed residencies at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland and the Bundanon Trust in Australia. guilherme bergamini was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He graduated in journalism and has been working with photography for 22 years. Through this art, Bergamini intends to express his experiences, worldview, and anxieties. He has received awards in national and international competitions and festivals, and has taken part in group and solo exhibitions in 21 countries. He has had his work published in several Brazilian and foreign media outlets. He publishes part of his photographic journey on www.guilhermebergamini.com elina bergmark wiberg is a Swedish artist who centers her practice around an interest in the â€œvisually elastic object,â€? a concept born out of an attempt to define sculpture that examines repetitive motions and the layering of realities. She is currently based in Stockholm after fine arts studies in Paris and Odense, Denmark. Some of her recent exhibitions include XX Hoveder at Kunsthal ved siden af, Svendborg, Nemme Roser at Ă˜en, Copenhagen, and PILLOW at Konsthall C, Farsta.

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shanita bigelow’s work is forthcoming or published in Bombay Gin, New American Writing, Callaloo, African American Review, Kaffeeklatsch, and Anomaly, among other publications. Her chapbook, Wherever Clarity is Necessary, is available through dancing girl press. ekaterina costa is a Russian-American multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of Slanted House Collective currently based in Paris. Her work investigates themes of memory and identity through language and documented spaces. The works manifest primarily as text and photography installations. Ekaterina’s self-published artist’s books include today and every day (2016) and Cloudberry Season (2017). Her work has been exhibited in multiple group exhibitions in Paris. travis dahlke’s work has appeared in literary journals such as Structo, Sporklet, Apt, Bridge Eight Press, OCCULUM, and The Longleaf Review. He has a chapbook available from The Head and the Hand Press, and a novella with Otherwhere Press. Find him at deffbridges.com lawdenmarc decamora is a Filipino poet and teacher. He holds an MFA in creative writing and is presently completing his MA in literary and cultural studies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Seattle Review, Drunken Boat (now Anomaly), Cordite Poetry Review, Kitaab, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. He has received several nominations from literary publications for the Best of the Net Anthology. He teaches literature and humanities at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas (UST) – the oldest existing Catholic university in Asia. genevieve deguzman is a poet and writer of fiction. Her work has appeared in Five:2:One, Folio, Gravel, Hobart, The Puritan, Reed Magazine, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, and elsewhere. Born in the Philippines, raised in California, and road-tested in 20+ countries, she now lives in Portland, Oregon. Find her on the web at about.me/genevievedeguzman Logan February is a Nigerian poet and a book critic. His work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, Tinderbox, The Bind, The Raleigh Review, and more. He has been nominated for Best of the Net Awards, and

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his first full-length manuscript, Mannequin in the Nude (PANK Books, 2019), was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He is also the author of How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press, 2017) and Painted Blue with Saltwater (Indolent Books, 2018). You can find him at loganfebruary.com federico federici is a physicist, translator, and writer. He lives between Berlin and the Ligurian Apennines. His works have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Magma, Le Monde Diplomatique, Raum, Trafika Europe, and others. Among his books: the long poem in English and German Requiem auf einer Stele (2017), Mrogn (2017, Elio Pagliarani Prize) presented at the 19th Poesiefestival Berlin, and the asemic album Liner notes for a Pithecanthropus Erectus sketchbook, with a foreword by SJ Fowler. In 2017 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano Prize for prose. His last collection is Alle Lichter schief am Himmel. anne Gorrick is a writer and visual artist who lives in West Park, New York. She is the author of seven books, including An Absence So Great and Spontaneous It Is Evidence of Light (the Operating System, 2018); My Beauty is an Occupiable Space (Paloma Press, 2018), a collaboration with John Bloomberg-Rissman; and The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). She also co-edited (with poet Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016). She serves on the board of trustees at Century House Historical Society, home of the Widow Jane Mine, an all-volunteer organization (www.centuryhouse.org) devoted to the historic preservation and investigation through the arts of the now defunct cement industry in Rosendale, New York. joan hawkins teaches Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. She has published extensively on horror cinema and the avant-garde. Her latest academic work, William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. She has been writing and performing creative memoir and spoken-word pieces for approximately five years. This is her first creative nonfiction publication.

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mc hyland is a PhD candidate in English Literature at New York University, and holds MFAs in Poetry and Book Arts from the University of Alabama. From her research, she produces scholarly and poetic texts, artists’ books, and public art projects. She is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, as well as the author of several poetry chapbooks – most recently THE END PART ONE (Magic Helicopter Press 2017) and (with Anna Gurton-Wachter) The Laundry Poem/Five Essays on the Lyric (self-published, 2018) – and the poetry collections Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010) and THE END (Sidebrow, forthcoming 2019). shayma idris is a freelance photographer and a dentist by profession. With the help of her smartphone camera, she documents her life in Egypt and Sudan. Inspired by The Everyday Projects, she is the Everyday Khartoum project founder and Everyday Cairo contributor. Ever since she was a student, Shayma has been interested in raising the health and general living conditions of the underprivileged; she now works as a team member and has founded two organizations focusing on improving health issues in Sudan. maren kames is a freelance writer and translator living in Berlin. Her writing is situated on the borders between poetry, prose, and drama, and is often staged as interdisciplinary live performances and installations accompanied by sound and video. Her first book, HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU (Secession Verlag für Literatur), was published in 2016 and is being translated into English by Bradley Schmidt. In 2019, she will be a fellow of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, and her second book, LUNA LUNA, is forthcoming. šime knežević is a writer and artist. His poems have appeared in Ambit, Cordite Poetry Review, Magma, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. He lives in Sydney. c.m. lindley is a UC Berkeley alum and a creative director living in the Los Angeles. She’s currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel. Sometimes she posts about the books she’s reading on Instagram @c.m.lindley.

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wendy lotterman’s chapbook Intense Holiday was published in 2016 by After Hours Ltd. She is writing a dissertation on classical liberalism and the lyric in the United States. Her email is wendy.lotterman@nyu.edu. alex luke is a fiction writer from London. She was a recipient of the 2018 Maat Scholarship at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and her work can be found in The Good Journal. She currently lives in Philadelphia and is completing an MFA in fiction at Rutgers University–Camden. alex marsh is a poet and publisher who has recently had his work published and performed as part of Datableed and Praxis. He is based in London and has just completed his MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway. He also self-publishes books of poetry, most recently Give Me That Living Water (2018). blessing musariri has published four children’s titles, two of which have won national awards. She writes short stories and poems, many of which have been published (and translated) in various international anthologies and online publications. Some of her short stories are included in South African high-school English textbooks. She holds an MA in Diplomatic Studies from the University of Westminster and originally trained to be a lawyer (called to the English Bar in 1997). She has since worked as a freelance editing and proofreading consultant, an English teacher, and a project coordinator for the British Council in Harare. tolu oloruntoba, born in Ibadan, Nigeria, is a somewhat-lapsed physician and itinerant poet. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Bird’s Thumb, Entropy, Obsidian, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in the Dansk PEN Magazine. He lives in the Greater Vancouver area. eugene ostashevsky is the author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB, 2017), a poetry novel about challenges in communication between a pirate and a parrot. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck, it was published by kookbooks as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt.

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sarah payne grew up in Maine, and lived and worked for the better part of a decade in south Louisiana. She is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. robyn maree pickens is a PhD candidate in ecological aesthetics at the University of Otago, Aotearoa - New Zealand. Her poetry has appeared in Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, Matador Review, Jacket 2, and at ARTSPACE, Auckland. Her poetry criticism has appeared in Rain Taxi and Jacket 2. She was a finalist of the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize judged by Eileen Myles. bradley schmidt grew up in rural Kansas, completed a B.A. in German Studies at a local small liberal arts college, studied German Literature and Theology in Marburg, and started a doctoral project on Schleiermacher in Halle an der Saale before completing a masters in translation studies at Leipzig University. His first translation of a novel, Anatomy of a Night by Anna Kim, was published in 2013 by Frisch & Co. He lives and works in Leipzig as a translator and instructor at Leipzig University. alexis smiley smith’s wanderlust heart brought her from Oregon to Berlin via a one-way ticket and a desire for connection. Her writing life centers on using personal narrative to uncover the universe of the human condition. She holds a BA in English/Creative Writing and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. “Uncle of Things” is part of her thesis work entitled “Liminal Spaces: Essays On the Beautiful Terror.” donna stonecipher is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Transaction Histories (2018), and one prose book, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). She lives in Berlin. jeremy tiang’s translations include novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Zhang Yueran, Chan Ho-Kei, and Li Er; plays by Xu Nuo, Wei Yu-Chia, Zhan Jie, and Quah Sy Ren; and most recently, Jackie Chan’s autobiography Never Grow Up. He is also a playwright and the author of the novel State of Emergency (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize) and the short-story collection It Never Rains on National Day.

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ollie tong grew up in Cardiff and currently lives in Edinburgh. josé trejo-maya was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, and he spent his childhood in the small neighboring rural pueblo of Tarimoró. He has been published in various literary journals in the UK, the US, India, Spain, Australia, and Argentina. He was a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee, was awarded third place in the 2016 international poetry competition of El Atlantico, the Canary Islands Center for Caribbean Studies, and received honorable mention in the 2017 international Fusionando Palabras competition. He is a remnant of the Nahuatlacah oral tradition, a tonalpouhque Mexican, and a Purepecha/Otomi commoner. jason wee is an artist and a writer working between urbanism, queer feelings, poetry, and photography. He is keenly interested in secrets and their futures, idealisms and their conundrums. He founded and directs Grey Projects, an artists’ library and residency, and is an editor of the poetry journal Softblow. He is the author of the poetry collection The Monsters Between Us and co-editor of the anthology We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow, as well as numerous other publications. His forthcoming collection, An Epic of Durable Departures, will be launched at the 2018 Singapore Writers Festival. He has been an artist-in-residence at Artspace, Sydney; Tokyo Wonder Site; Gyeonggi Creation Center, South Korea; and ZK/U, Berlin. He lives and works in Singapore and New York. Matvei Yankelevich’s books include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square) and Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook). zou jingzhi is an acclaimed Chinese playwright, poet, and prose writer. Extremely influential as a poet in the 1980s, he has continued to shape public opinion in China more recently through his stage productions and screenplays, including The Grandmaster (dir. Wong Kar-Wai) and Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (dir. Zhang Yimou). He is a founding member of the theatre collective Longmashe, which regularly produces his plays. Zou is a member of the Chinese Writers Association and a resident writer of the Beijing Writers Association. “Green Vines” is from his collection Ninth Building (2010), forthcoming in Jeremy's Tiang's translation.

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ISSUE 1 8 Tarek Sebastian Al-Shamma Elizabeth Allen Guilherme Bergamini Elina Bergmark Wiberg Shanita Bigelow Ekaterina Costa Travis Dahlke Lawdenmarc Decamora Genevieve DeGuzman Logan February Federico Federici Anne Gorrick Joan Hawkins MC Hyland Shayma Idris Maren Kames Šime Knežević C.M. Lindley Wendy Lotterman Alex Luke Alex Marsh Blessing Musariri Tolu Oloruntoba Eugene Ostashevsky Sarah Payne Robyn Maree Pickens Bradley Schmidt Alexis Smiley Smith Donna Stonecipher Jeremy Tiang Ollie Tong José Trejo-Maya Jason Wee Matvei Yankelevich Zou Jingzhi DE €10, EU €11, UK £10, SE 120 kr sandjournal.com