Spring 2012 Issue
The selected, online edition of Vol. XXV No. 1 is now live and features work from David H. Wells, Hugh Fox, Marisa Handler, Colleen Kinder, Sarah Blake, Robert Shuster, and others.
CURRENT ISSUE » Disaster – Vol. XXV No. 1 | Spring 2012
Poetry
Here I Am
Here I am at 78, my first wife, Lucia Ungaro de Xevallos,
Drops in today, “I hear you have bladder and prostate cancer,
That’s terrible, even if we aren’t still married, tú sabes qué
Te quiero más que cualquier otra persona del mundo entero /
You know that I love you more than anyone else in the whole
World … ,” “Y tú sabes qué yo siento igual / And you know I
Feel the same … ,” two hours, coffee, poppy seed rolls, going
Over our years in Peru, the archaeology of Tiwanaku in Bolivia,
My realizing that it was the religious/mythological basis for the
Garden of Eden, the Hindu Home of the Gods, Ti-a-Naku in …
more »
Fiction
Blood and Honey
My parents ran a sweet shop, and as a child I worked with them after school, rolling and shaping the dough, blanching and grinding the almonds, placing tiny silver balls of sugar in the center of heart-shaped mkhabez. They came to Algiers from a village in the Kabyle when I was only a year old. My childhood coincided with the war: I was four when it began, seven during the Battle of Algiers. There were many days I missed school, many days I worked with my mother in the kitchen behind our storefront. But even during the worst of it, when customers came to our store they set their worries aside, they smiled, they complimented the sweets. We were in the business of pleasure, of happy occasions. My schoolmates envied me. They thought I did nothing all day but gorge on sweets, and I did not correct them.
more »
Nonfiction
Measure the Sky Over Mexico City
I first heard about H1N1 over sushi dinner in Mexico City. It was just a flu then, not yet tied to swine, nor assigned a proper acronym, only worth a mention at dinner because it was killing people very nearby. “Twenty people,” claimed Chelsea, an American who did research at a Mexico City hospital. She said that some of the victims were doctors. “Scary, huh?” Chelsea asked, seeming to want my agreement.
I am not, never have been, the type to worry. In fact, if there’s one way I’ve rebelled against my mother, it’s my steady refusal to fret about dangers beyond my control. Worst-case scenarios (e.g.. car accidents on New Year’s, salmonella, identity theft) don’t hold up well in my mind. I guess I’d rather be dealt bad luck once or twice a decade than spend those ten years on guard. It’s always struck me as a better way to live.
more »
Poetry
The Fallible Face
- – featuring Levinas
i.
While firemen worked to get Kanye out,
he talked with his mother on the phone –
“Ma … Ma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I hurt myself.”
ii.
The airbag had not deployed and his head had smashed against the steering wheel.
His mother got on a plane.
more »
Fiction
The Existence of the Opposite
What could they do but bribe him? The Red Cross driver, too young, cupped his colorless hands around another cigarette and repeated his refusal to take the three women to the field. It was against regulations, he claimed, just impossible. Sixteen hours after the latest cease-fire had begun, Carmen, Marina, and Gisele had cornered him at a food distribution center because he looked vulnerable, fresh from elsewhere. Was there a truck available? The field was near a bridge, they told him — north of here, where it seemed certain (based on news from a courier) that the bodies of their men had been left in the snow. But this boy of a driver only tapped at the icy mud with his boots. “It won’t last,” he muttered, then furtively checked to see if any officials had heard and shrugged to disguise his persistent fear. “I heard guns in the hills already.”
