Issue 36
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My Life in Three Train Rides: Powder, Rails, Arrests
photo by Tony Wallin-Sato
by Tony Wallin-Sato
Part 1
fukaku irite / kamiji no oku o / tazunureba / mata ue mo naki / mine no matsukazeFollowing the paths the gods passed over, I seek their innermost place; up and up to the highest of all: peak where wind passes through pines. – Saigyo
I was thirteen when I was first arrested. Detained. Humiliated. Treated as if I already hit puberty. At thirteen I still carried my baby fat. Just had my braces removed.
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The Garden Wall
by Lorraine Hanlon Comanor
“We’re going to get along famously,” said my new neighbor, a realtor in his early seventies, as he bent over to admire one of my planters. “Both of us having green thumbs. But this garden isn’t up to our standards.”
He was referring to a ten-foot-wide strip between our two houses of red sage, polygala, hydrangeas, and marguerites that extended some seventy feet back from the street. The bird-and-butterfly-friendly plot, which my former neighbors and I had congenially maintained, was shaded by two ornamental pears and a holly tree. Like all gardens in our public urban development,
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A Normal Life
by Zia Jaffrey
Excerpt from a manuscript on South Africa
I don’t remember who we were planning to abduct. I may have got it wrong on the amnesty application. Maybe it was K in Soweto…
-(Security policeman, who shot his wife)On the train back from Nyack to Manhattan, after having dinner with my sister, I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t gone that far in love with anyone, except Louis. My sister and Frank were guiding K on what to expect when he met my parents. That meant that they assumed that this was it for me–for us.
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Traveling With a Door
image Lorenz Stoer (1567), from The Public Domain Review
by Sandra Hunter
The girl watches the woman—green beret, yellow balloon pants, blue shoe, white shoe, ripped red scarf around one wrist—an eight-foot slab of wood across her back, bending her into prayer. The woman prays and curses across the road in front of cars stunned into stillness. When she reaches the curb, she unloads against a telephone pole the slab, nestling wood to wood. She breathes heavily, head down, drags her scarfed wrist across her face and neck, looks up to the sky, stretches her arms wide,
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Horde’s Oeuvre
image detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - Public Domain Review
by Ian Power-Luetscher
A fucking gryphon got our mayor last night and now everybody in Pod24 is just losing their shit.
I hear the news on the community feed, during the “rise and shine” talk block. We’re in the kitchen and I’m pouring juice for Lydia when someone yells, “Kenny Staples got picked off by a gryphon outside of the bank. You can see it on securityCam8.” And then the feed goes bonkers, and I knock over the OJ carton.
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Cousins
diagram by Thure Brandt (1895), Public Domain Review
by Claire Donato
A woman and her ex-partner were together for ten years but never married, despite their shared affinity for The New York Times Vows column, which appears on Sundays in the newspaper’s Style section. Every weekend, they would read Vows aloud to one another— idyllic short stories of couples meeting, falling in love, getting engaged, and marrying, presented sans red flags or conflict. Any real interpersonal turbulence was smoothed over to the pitch of a PG-rated romantic comedy movie. They cut out their favorites and neatly
