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In Remembrance of Summer by Gina Chung
Above: Standing Girl, Back View by Egon Schiele
Of all the things that I’d like to be doing now, instead of waiting for things to get better, waiting until there are no longer sirens haunting my neighborhood every hour with their banshee wails, waiting until it feels safe to no longer feel so afraid—I’d like to be wearing a light cotton dress on a hot summer day here in Brooklyn, on a rooftop that’s really just a glorified patch of silver-painted asphalt but feels like something holy in the orange glow of a July sun.
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Three Poems by Peter Spagnuolo
Above: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau
Cartographer
The monkeys scold that I lost my way, I’ve gone
mad on the march through you, a hand on the whip—
your impenetrable wild I leave undone,
and tame your jungle waste—but wrecked my ship,
so I must spread you open, with no way back.
My rivals tell I’ve grown too old to play
the boy explorer, yet at that perfumed crack
where wells a secret font of youth, I lay
with my discovery, -
Four “Corn Songs” by Kinga Tóth (translated from the Hungarian by Timea Balogh) Drawings by Kinga Tóth
Corn Songs
song five
they pierce the ground with spoon straws
that’s how the roots will breathe
that’s how they’ll pull them out when they’re ripe
the others arrive behind the diggers
they write with felt pens
take away the dialect and unsettle everyone
they piss with their legs apart
and that’s when they forget what
they talked about at harvest time
they take the tongues out of their mouths
with which they were understood
and take pictures till they are distracted from the conversation
only the spoon-holding hands remain
squatting they examine the air-bagged roots
this will serve as amnesty and the writers
will be the only ones permitted to speak -
“Quarantine” by Rimas Uzgiris
By day we count like clocks the dust motesAnd wait for the hour of maximum sunWhen the forest folds us inLike the first morning, Eve yet to meet a snake.
The passage back is through the cemeteryHaunted by the occasional humanShuffling from grave to grave,Pottering with plants and sloughed pine.
We park ourselves before electric iridescenceTrying to feel our way towards a future:Seeing only fear and desire and no Eightfold Path, -
“Artemis” by Peter Warzel
The old dreams of hunting, the moon. Deep in the blood, memories of poets and kings asking for and receiving stories of the first and the last. The sanctuaries of Artemis are spread throughout the groves of the Mediterranean and she shape-changes by location. She, Artemis Diana, had come here, to my backyard.
On a Friday evening two years ago, the night of Zozobra burning when I refused to attend but could hear the groaning from Fort Marcy Park and the annoyance of the helicopters keeping order on the crowd, I was standing in the yard having a cigar and a beer and called my son Zach to remind him of the annual auto-da-fe,
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“Deep Time and Dark Spaces: Robert Macfarlane’s Underland” by S.N. Kirby
Under the earth is a world far stranger and far more mystical than our humdrum life here up top. Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, detailing these mysterious underground places, serves as part field guide and magic handbook for us surface dwellers. Underland weaves together a narrative of not just the earth and its underworld, but of the history, the present, and the future of mankind. This is not a book for the claustrophobic.
From the start, Macfarlane directly says that this was a book he intended to be less about humans and more about the mysteries below the earth;
