Insomnia by Cynthia Hardy The pillow has heard it all: the litany of undone things. The horses stamp the barn at night; each thump of hoof against board accuses. Not nearly enough hay, they tell me, and where’s all the green stuff? Snow fills their paddock to their knees. And what about my words to you? Should I have said íf instead of when; what then? The darkness spreads full and warm. Blankets tangle. The cat pats my cheek with her untrimmed paw. Should I change the litter box now? Call a long-lost friend? The horses set out across the land, looking for the barn they deserve, red paint and all. A stream flows year round, its banks curve, green plush, to the clear water. There are other horses, none with shaggy coats or dirt-packed hooves. The cat wants to be in the dream. She perches her wiry self on the black mare’s back and weaves, tail spiraling for balance as they gallop off. You rise, say, I’m going with them. Fine, I say. My eyes blink; blink propagates blink. I sweep the blankets across my shoulders like some Versace robe, a gown of sleep. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue From We Tempt Our Luck , finalist in the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Chapbook Contest, 2009. This poem reflects some themes I often go back to—the horses, a cat or a dog, the impact of winter on the psyche, insomnia, and dreams. It was also a response to a set of prompts I set myself from bits of found language—in this case, the word “Versace.” The “you” in these two poems may or may not be a real person. .................................................................................................................................................................................... CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, with a new poetry collection, Rude Weather forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Next - Mākara Beach by Michael McLane Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue TIGHTENING SKATES Brock Dethier I gouge my numb index fingers under the stiff laces, pry for leverage, the tiniest bit of slack, jerk it through, knuckle the gain in place up sixty pairs of eyelets, Corey's, then Larkin's, then Tanner's, lower back scar bulging, knees wet from kneeling, jacket flecked with frozen spray kicked by kids' skates, and thank my mother in her ancient, thin parka, kneeling beside her mitten shells, tightening the first to get laced, the butt of each skate denting her thigh, hands blotched redwhite from cold, hoping her fingers will still obey and lace her own, give her a moment of grace to glide before the first one gets cold ears or needs retightening. Published in the collection, Reclamation (Popcorn Press, 2015) . I imagine most parents can relate to the kind of moment I capture in “Tightening Skates:” doing something for your kids makes you suddenly appreciate what your parents did for you when you were a kid. I don’t think I planned what’s now my favorite part of that poem—that it allows the mother briefly to glide away, free, something she had trouble doing in real life. Previous BROCK DETHIER retired from Utah State University after directing the writing composition program for 11 years. His publications include From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music (Heinemann, 2003), First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers (Utah State University Press, 2005), Twenty-One Genres and How to Write Them (Utah State University Press, 2013), and two books of poetry, Ancestor Worship (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and Reclamation (Popcorn Press, 2015). Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue DEAR CARLEY Beth Colburn Orozco My daughter turned four the day before my scheduled trip to Honduras, where I had accepted a teaching position at a secondary school in El Progreso. The paperwork, pictures, and letters I saved from my pregnancy and her adoption were scattered on my bed. Packing would have to wait as I studied her baby pictures taken by her adoptive parents and sent to me through the adoption agency. In one, she was propped up against sofa cushions holding a baby ring with plastic keys, her chocolate-brown eyes and chunky cheeks smiling back at me. The guilt and shame acted like trained assassins hired to kill me. I thought of canceling my trip and curling up among her things. Instead, I picked up the little wristband she wore at the hospital, searching for parts of her, hoping her DNA, like a map, would lead me to her. I had chosen her parents from a stack of letters from people wanting a family. I wanted a family, too, and had promised myself, while in a Milwaukee courtroom, signing away my parental rights, that I was making the right choice. I was wrong. I was in my twenties when I got pregnant, squandering those precious young adult years with the wrong people while making one bad decision after another. For years, I worked in restaurants and bars. Living on tips, I worried about making rent and car payments. I didn’t have a safety net or a place to raise a child. My friend Tammy got pregnant during her second semester of college. She was raising her little girl in government-assisted housing with the help of welfare assistance and food stamps. One morning, I stopped by with donuts. A little pink bike with a banana seat, a flat tire, and mangled training wheels lay on its side on the front stoop of the apartment building. I dragged it into the yard. Tammy and her daughter lived on the second floor. The dingy linoleum stairs and hallway were filthy, and the walls were in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. The apartment door was ajar. Tammy’s little girl sat on a tattered rug, eating a bowl of cereal, and watching Scooby Do. Tammy’s feet dangled off the sofa. She was asleep. I set the bag of donuts on the floor just inside the apartment. Tammy’s little girl never looked up. Outside, the broken bike lay on the grass like a wounded animal. Instinctually, I placed my hands on my belly to protect my baby. I’m not raising my daughter like this. The memory of the broken pink bike, an image stacked among so many I collected like tarot cards during that time, reminds me why I chose to give up my daughter. I named my daughter Carley after seeing Carly Simon singing “Coming Around Again Itsy Bitsy Spider” on an MTV video: I know nothing stays the same / But if you’re willing to play the game / It will be coming around again. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Kelsey. That name belonged to someone I hadn’t held in my arms at the hospital when she was born. I was unable or maybe unwilling to accept the truth. For years, my journal entries would begin, Dear Carley . I picked up the journal given to me by a dear friend who would, years later, die from colon cancer while her three children were still in school. It wasn’t fair. There was a single entry because, even though I had promised to write, it was too painful to address my daughter in such a concrete way. I scanned the entry for clues to help me understand how I came to surrender my baby. Then, as now, it makes no sense to me. March 3, 1992 Dear Carley, -If I wrote to you each time I thought of you, I would have volumes of letters to share. -[The day I gave you up] was the worst day of my life. I felt alone and empty. I also felt about ten years old and that at any minute someone was going to start making decisions for me that would take away the pain and guilt. -Before I had you, I always had a net or web under me to catch me if I fell: my friends and family, even things like money, a car, and a job. But all the security I had could not help me make the decisions I made with you. In many ways, I had to grow up. You have helped me do that. -I am sorry. I am sorry I wasn’t there to hold you when you couldn’t sleep. I am sorry I wasn’t there to catch you when you took your first steps, and I am sorry I won’t be there to answer all the questions you will have about your adoption. There wasn’t time to sink into the dank well where I often treaded deep, dark waters. There was still so much to do before I left in the morning. I gathered the papers and photos and returned them to the adoption box, a plastic tote I kept stored in my closet. I debated taking it to Latin America, but the box was insurance that someday I would return. I would never leave my daughter behind again. I slid the journal along with a few notebooks and a pocket-sized calendar I purchased at Walgreens, into my backpack. It was time to finish packing, and it was time to untangle Carley from the past. I would take her with me as a traveling companion rather than a symbol of grief I had worn like a heavy talisman around my neck for so long, I had forgotten what a privilege it was to have brought her into this world. "Dear Carley" is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, The Seasons of My Bones . It's been thirty-six years, yet I still struggle with these words: I gave my daughter up for adoption. In this essay, a breakthrough occurs when I decide to look toward the future rather than dwell on the past. Previous BETH COLBURN OROZCO teaches literature and creative writing at Cochise College in southeastern Arizona. Most recently, her work was published in The Ana and was accepted for The Letter Review shortlist. Beth's short stories and essays have won awards, and more can be found at bethcolburnorozco.com . Next

Gradual "Just one word....plastics." The Graduate, 1967 by Natasha Sajé I wrench and cut the clear thick film— envisioning its path to trash. And next? The hiding place where no one ever goes. This stuff gets smaller and smaller… micro to nano to who knows what. Every way you look at it you lose. 1% of me is probably it already, seeding cells with particles, through infinitesimal scissor-teeth. The vision that was planted in my brain. In Latin, sapiens means wise. The future will call us something else. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in The NonBinary Review. From The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo Press, 2023). The poem “Gradual” began about ten years ago with my thinking about the micro-plastics humans ingest. I recalled the scene in the 1967 film The Graduate where Mr. McGuire says to Benjamin, “One word: plastics…there’s a great future in plastics.” He was right: in the 60s we still used wax paper and foil, glass and ceramic. Today it’s hard to buy anything edible that isn’t wrapped in plastic. The film uses Simon and Garfunkel songs, so I spliced in lines from “Mrs. Robinson” and “The Sound of Silence.” The last line of the poem, with a switch, became the title of my book. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NATASHA SAJÉ is the author of five books of poems: The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023); Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014); Bend (Tupelo, 2004); Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994); and Special Delivery (Diode Editions chapbook, 2021). Her prose books are a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014) and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir: Love, Out of Place (Trinity, 2020). Honors include the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals including Kenyon Review , American Poetry Review , The Paris Review , Ploughshares , and The New York Times . natashasaje.com Next - You Oughta Know by Brock Dethier Next

The Dream by Shanan Ballam the shiny taste of rain when I inhale love leads us back to the things of this world the pink roses unfurl perfume the moon is a white lily about to bloom having a stroke erases half the world half your working body and your voice the owl in the willow is a ghost it calls to me through the open night window, calls to me in my dreams in smeared colors it sounds like windchimes my lips taste like lilies— the cold scent of rain on stones— a dark curtain embroidered with light the owl is a prophetess singing to me in my sleep the owl is a part of the willow tree is a part of my heart whispering you will recover fragrance of lilies in a glass vase the crabapple tree is dotted with pearls of rain my lips taste like water that is: they have no taste the rain has turned to snow it floats down in swirling spirals like falling into a dream the windchime speaks in the voice of god like a waterfall, fluid, like the song of a canyon wren tumbling down the canyon last night I dreamed I could walk again Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature . From first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). I survived a massive stroke on January 9, 2022. I had expressive aphasia—an inability to speak. This is one of my favorite poems because my speech therapist told me to observe what was around me and to focus on details. I used an exercise called “20 Little Poetry Projects” to get me started, and it asks you to focus on the five senses and to add synesthesia, mixing the senses. .................................................................................................................................................................................... SHANAN BALLAM is the author of the poetry manuscripts The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013), Inside the Animal (Main Street Rag, 2019), and the chapbook first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). shananballam.org Next - July by Shanan Ballam Next

Barbara Huntington < Back to Breakthroughs Issue OUR BIG TOES Barbara Huntington 00:00 / 03:01 OUR BIG TOES Barbara Huntington I look down at my toe disgusting thing, although it joggles a pleasant memory my husband, before his death despite his Parkinson’s shaking head his delight, surrounded by giggling girls, the deer-in-the-headlight fear in his eyes briefly replaced by what? Lust, memories perhaps of a youthful paramour, remembered sighs? When I could no longer trim his thickened nails that taunted him my friend said “don’t fool with it take him where they have tools for it” Thus, after our trip to the Apple store where geniuses seemed to want to help him more than their mostly younger clientele we walked back to the parking lot where a manicure salon reached out pulled me in and I pulled him no other customers in the store I never frequented places like those rarely manicured fingers or toes a mountains and garden gal, I relished mud between my toes and besides, my nose rebelled at the chemical smells that filled those places A young woman asked me what I would like, probably assumed Fred would leave, busy himself at a restaurant, store, or maybe the library almost next door But I pointed to his sandaled feet size ten to match his 6-2 height which wasn’t his size any more stooped, twisted neck, face forced toward the floor suddenly all the girls gathered round him smiled, giggled again, and showed him to a chair and Fred obeyed and grinned at them But among the smiles one face was cross An old woman stared, perhaps the boss, Gave me a glare, pointed at my feet so I nodded, sure, as she hustled me to a chair, then pulled out her stool and what looked like a very dangerous tool I soaked and watched the fun young women flirting with Fred He, happy as a clam or maybe a knight, a ladies man pampered and bathed, perhaps he imagined girlish hearts being won I closed my eyes, soothed by the soak until I awoke with a gasp of pain water turned red with the nip of her implement I swear that old woman had an evil grin but I apologized did not want my predicament to spoil his fun assured them all I was ok as she applied some herb and Fred maintained his goofy smile and mollified, I hid the pain Then I waylaid a laughing attendant whispered my plan and she conveyed to the rest my bequest and by the time we left Fred was enchanted by the happy face painted on his big toenail No longer depressed, a happy male That’s the day the fungus found my big toe but oh I’d let that old woman repeat her crime if I could see Fred’s happy faces one more time "Our Big Toes" was published on Vox Populi . It was a breakthrough for me because I could remember my late husband and laugh again instead of crying. I had fun with the internal rhyme. Sometimes poems take me forever, and sometimes they just flow out. This was the latter. Previous BARBARA HUNTINGTON was born in Albuquerque, NM and recently retired as Director of the Preprofessional Advising Office at San Diego State University. She has written poetry, children's books, memoir, and a handbook about how to get into the school of your choice, and her students who overcame tremendous odds to become wonderful healers as physicians, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, physician assistants, optometrists, chiropractors, and naturopathic doctors. barbarahuntington.com Next

Peach by Jennifer Tonge Come here's a peach he said and held it out just far enough to reach beyond his lap and off- ered me a room the one room left he said in all of Thessaloniki that night packed with traders The peach was lush I hadn't slept for days it was like velvet lips a lamp he smiled patted the bed for me I knew it was in fact the only room the only bed The peach trembled and he said Come nodding to make me agree I wanted the peach and the bed he said to take it see how nice it was and I thought how I could take it ginger- ly my finger- tips only touch- ing only it Not in or out I stayed in the doorway watching a fly He stroked the peach and asked where I was from I said the States he smiled and asked how long I'd stay The fly had found the peach I said I'd leave for Turkey in the morning I wanted so much to sleep and on a bed I thought of all the ways to say that word and that they must have gradient meanings He asked me did I want the peach and I said sure and took it from his hand He asked then if I'd take the room It costs too much I said and turned to go He said to stay a while and we could talk The sun was going down I said no thanks I'd head out on the late train but could I still have the peach and what else could he say to that but yes Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published in Poetry . It’s a bit embarrassing for my favorite of my own poems to be one from so long ago, but there it is. “Peach” sprang like Athena from my head and still has so much energy for me; it doesn’t rely in any way on my memory of the event that transpired it—no, that’s not a typo, I just made up a verb—but is its own event. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JENNIFER TONGE Received an MFA from the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Quarterly West , Poetry , Ploughshares , New England Review , and Bellingham Review . The recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Tonge has taught creative writing at the universities of Utah, Wisconsin, and Texas as well as at Butler University. She served as poetry editor of Quarterly West , as president of Writers@Work, on the board of City Art, and as associate editor at Dawn Marano and Associates. She lives and tends cats in Salt Lake City. Next - Your Last Day in Madison by Jennifer Tonge Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE DYING ROOM Paula Harrington Our father was seventy-six when our mother died. For almost three years, he’d been taking care of her while her health failed and her mood plummeted. She morphed from a fun-loving, kind, irreverent redhead into a cranky, frightened, white-haired old woman. The whole time, Dad somehow managed to remain solicitous of her. He loved to cook, so he would make her tasty little treats. A pioneer in the kitchen, he was hip to small plates long before most Americans knew they existed. His real agenda, though, was to get our mother to eat something. Anything. Her illness had made her lose her appetite, so whatever he cooked—no matter how tempting — she’d turn her nose up at it. He’d bring her a ramekin of ratatouille, say, with a flaky fresh biscuit on the side. Or a half-serving of baked stuffed scrod with two spears of steamed asparagus and a dab of lemon aioli. Maybe a few spoonfuls of his trademark pea soup flavored by a hefty hambone. “Here, Peg, try this,” he’d say, as if she were his taster and he was seeking her professional opinion. She would take it politely and thank him. But we all knew she didn’t mean it. What she really wanted to do was throw the food to the floor and never touch any of it again. But as furious as she was about getting sick and enfeebled, she did her best to fake it. She’d scrunch up her face, take a careful nibble, then concoct some excuse for putting the food aside. “Mmm,” she’d say. “Very good, Kev. Maybe just a little too salty.” Or “Oh, scrod. Wonderful. Did you remember to put dried parsley in the breading?” So Dad realized he had lost the woman he loved—the “real Peg”—well before she died. And we all knew we had lost our beloved mother. The day she finally left us for good, we dressed her in a coral-colored nightgown and matching robe. She lay all afternoon and into the evening in a hospital bed we’d set up downstairs while friends came and went to say goodbye. One brought her yellow roses, another rubbed sweet-smelling cream on her hands. She was already in a morphine fugue, though, only letting out the occasional noise that sounded like a cross between a mumble, chuckle, and growl. I guess you could say we gave her an old-fashioned Irish wake while she was technically still alive. After night fell, our brother came over with his guitar from his home nearby. Then he, my two sisters, and I sang Mum out. Our last song, I remember, was “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. There is a road, no simple highway Between the dawn and the dark of night And if you go, no one may follow That path is for your steps alone. Like a child again, I cried to myself, No, Mum, no! Don’t find that highway. But, of course, she already had. When she breathed her last, Dad was upstairs in their bedroom of forty years. We had encouraged him to get some rest, but the truth is I don’t think he wanted to be there when Mum actually passed. My brother didn’t either; he went home around 2 a.m. I understand how they felt. If you’d told me I could have been in the same room when my mother died, I would have said, impossible . Now I am glad I was there; it seemed only fair. She brought me into the world and I helped send her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that. So, in the end, only my sisters and I were present. Just the women of our family, which also seemed about right. For all our adult lives, the four of us had stayed up together whenever I, the family wanderer, came home to visit. My sisters would drive down from their homes in New Hampshire and Maine, and we would chat away with Mum about our lives, family friends, politics, books, and world events until we fell asleep in place. On the sofa, in the arm chairs, sprawled on the rug, flopping against each other, sharing sofa throws and pillows for bedding. That last night of her life, it felt only natural for us to lie down on the floor around her bed. We looked at each other and knew what to do. “The party’s over, Mum,” one of my sisters said. “We’re shutting our eyes and going to sleep.” Then we stayed still and quiet until, minutes later, we heard her death rattle. “The dining room has become the dying room,” my other sister whispered. Then we got up from the floor, linked arms, and went to tell Dad. "The Dying Room" first appeared in Grande Dame Literary Journal . It tells the story of my family's coming together for an old-fashioned Irish wake for my mother while she was technically still alive. My personal breakthrough was that I could be present in the room when she actually died because "she brought me into the world and I was helping to bring her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that." Previous PAULA HARRINGTON is a Maine writer and the former director of the Farnham Writers' Center at Colby College, where she also taught writing and literature. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris and is the author, with Ronald Jenn, of Mark Twain & France (University of Missouri, 2017). Her essays have appeared in Grande Dame Literary , Colby Magazine , and the Mark Twain Annual . Before entering academia, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Next

On the Disembarkation of Sergeant Nathan E. Cook in Auckland, 13 June 1942 by Michael McLane the photo is insufficient— a crudely drawn-map shows only what emerges from the depths what hides within is obscured here there be dragons, no here there be silhouettes and mimics there are only the hulking islands adrift, sloughed from some distant continent of steel full of flightless or unfledged birds we do not see the sky which is the same shade of grey as the hull we do not see the greens of gear the shade of pine the shade of gorse never know of the splinter in your hand from the dock end of the gangway made of local wood and weather-beaten your baggage, the unintended weight is centre-stage a black hole in the image your face half light, half shadow, you on the dark side of the moon Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Dark Mountain . Nathan Cook was the first American soldier to set foot in New Zealand during WWII. nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/first-american-soldier-lands-nz This is the first poem I wrote after my move to NZ in 2019. It engages with the strata of imperialism in NZ as well as the disorientation of someone far from home and perhaps well out of their depth. As my PhD work progressed, I continued to come back to it, taken by both its prescience for what the project would eventually become and its naivete (not unlike Cook’s own upon his arrival) about the history in which the new arrival is about to be immersed. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL MCLANE is the author of the chapbooks Trace Elements and Fume . He is an editor with Dark Mountain and Sugar House Review and was a founding editor of saltfront. He currently lives in Martinborough, Aotearoa/New Zealand and recently completed a PhD at the International Institute for Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.

The Afternoon on the Sava by Scott Abbott 9 April 2013 Every country has its rivers. That afternoon it was the Sava, not far from where it flows into the Danube under the once-stern gaze of Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress, far from the lesser rivers of my own American West. A houseboat was the gathering place, a rustic restaurant with no sign to announce its presence. The invitation had come in response to questions about a translation. Peter Handke had replied, in English: “On April 8th I shall be in Belgrade/Serbia. Žarko will come too, also Zlatko. And you??” On the back flap of the envelope, below F-92370 Chaville, was an Arabic word I could not decipher. A friend later told me it was “Chaville.” Packed into a little Peugeot, a big Jeep Cherokee, and a good-sized taxi, the column of friends, fellow travelers, and distant neighbors wound off the backbone of the white city. At the end of a streetcar line in New Belgrade, the Jeep bumped up over the curb and ascended a steep dirt path to the top of a dike. The Peugeot eased tentatively over the curb and up onto the dike. The taxi followed a more circuitous route but found the top of the dike as well. The cars parked and the passengers disembarked. Peter Handke tugged a dark-brown stocking cap over his grey hair. He wore a knee-length black coat, black pants that twice had been lengthened by hand, and high-top black shoes. Dark-haired Sophie Semin wore a long black coat with sleeves colorfully embroidered by her husband. Ljiljane Kapor was youthful in brown pants and a matching jacket. Her attentive assistant Marija had neon-red hair. Maja Kusturica warded off the cold with an elegant white coat and bright blue scarf. Thin-lipped poet Matija Bećković wore a brown coat and a Sherlock Holmes hat. Theater director Mladen Materić’s blue jeans were baggy at the ass. Short-haired novelist and translator Žarko Radaković had no hat but was snug in a brown wool coat. A dark-haired Belgrade journalist and her younger protégé wore dresses under warm coats. And I, a university professor who wanted, someday, to call myself a writer, was comforted by a black coat against which my long grey hair looked nearly white. The first week of April still saw the river at its spring-flood stage, making access from the shore difficult. Wooden steps led down the grassy dike to a long plank bridge that carried the party out between still leafless trees whose trunks seemed surprised to be rising out of the floodwater; at the bridge’s end ten steep steps led down into the shallow water; two weathered planks reached from the last step above water to a forklift pallet; three planks continued the makeshift bridge to a gravel bank from which two steps led up onto a platform supported by four red 55-gallon drums; from that secure perch, thick planks reached onto a long, floating bridge that ended at the door of a low-roofed restaurant for boaters on the Sava River—and on this day, for the eleven guests who had approached over the labyrinthine path. We shed our coats and scarves and hats in a dining room heated by a small wood fire in a cast-iron stove. Windows looked out over the Sava on one side and to the flooded trees on the other. We took seats at a table that stretched the width of the room along two long windows. On the previous night in the Hotel Moskva, so late in the night that the next day had already begun, so late that who knows how many bottles of Riesling, including a special bottle of Morava offered by the attentive hotel manager, had been emptied by the three who remained after the Serbian poet had said good-night and Sophie had gone to bed—on that night before the afternoon on the Sava, Žarko entertained us with stories about a legendary pair of sly and slow-witted characters. Mujo and Haso went to a soccer game. They agreed that whenever either team scored they would drink a pint of beer. The game ended in a 0-0 tie. Let’s go to a basketball game, suggested Haso. Suljo painted a picture with two naked people and took it to a gallery. It is called Mujo in Sarajevo, he told the gallery owner. “Who are the people?” the owner asked. “The woman is Fatima, Mujo’s wife, and the man is Haso.” “And where is Mujo?” “Mujo is in Sarajevo.” Peter claimed he was not a good teller of jokes but that proved to be only partially true. He said, for instance, that he was thinking about repainting Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon . He would paint only one man, he said, a drunk who would stand there contemplating two moons. I was halfway through a long joke before I remembered it required an English-language pun and the joke limped to its conclusion. I mentioned my brother who had died of AIDS two decades earlier and described the book of “fraternal meditations” I was writing: Immortal for Quite Some Time . Peter looked at me curiously: “Du bist mir ein Rätzel.” “I am a puzzle to myself,” I replied. The meal on the houseboat began with a toast: slivovitz in small glasses raised to the Austrian author whom the Kapor Foundation and the Serbian president would honor the next day. Plates of tomatoes, spring onions, radishes, and kajmak cheese were the first course, served with mineral water and carafes of red and white wine. Platters of breaded Sava fish followed, thick fish steaks with roasted potatoes and Serbian salad. My mind slipped to the afternoon at Peter’s house in Chaville. Had it been ten years? Fifteen? Peter sautéed mushrooms and served them with dark bread and Portuguese white wine. H e gave me the first pages of the American translation of Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht and asked for an evaluation. I read a few pages aloud and then pointed out an early sentence that, in the original, ended with an der Stelle des zwischendurch mich weiterwürgenden ‘Ende’ das Ding Verwandlung . The translation rendered this as the ‘end’ that still gagged me now and then was more and more firmly replaced by this metamorphosis thing. With the throwaway silliness of this metamorphosis thing , I told Peter, das Ding Verwandlung has lost its philosophical tension. And the carefully wrought, eleven-word original phrase has been bloated to nineteen flaccid words. Your sentences have been flattened; the nuance is gone. It had struck me then and now again that this is what I most feared about my own life, that it was commonplace, lackluster, banal, flaccid. At the turn of the century, at the beginning of the new millennium, still married, still practicing the Mormon religion I had been raised in, I woke from a nightmare in which my little car was surrounded by a neverending cluster of identical cars that descended from the sky in ranks of ten to land in perfect synchrony and drive obediently along an endless highway just wide enough for ten little cars. I fled the marriage, left the Mormons, and sought antidotes to the unsettling dream in Handke’s supple and self-questioning sentences, found succor in the author’s preface to A Journey to the Rivers where he asserted that he had written about his journey through Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar—of aesthetic veracity . I would live with aesthetic veracity, I thought. My life would be a slow and dialectical unfolding. And I would be skeptical of my attempts at aesthetic veracity and dialectical unfolding. That day in Chaville, Peter showed me a letter from American publisher Roger Straus to Siegfried Unseld, Handke’s German publisher: We have a problem, and his name is Peter Handke. The books weren’t selling as they once had. How was it possible, I asked myself, that an editor with Straus’ reputation had no idea what the translations were doing to Peter’s work? I removed the bones from a second fish steak and reflected on how challenging I found each of Peter’s new books. It helped to read with a pen in hand. Der Grosse Fall (The Great Fall) , for instance. I had read it slowly, fascinated by the dual metaphor of standing and falling announced by the title, attentive to the slow, inquiring development of the metaphor. I wondered if my method was compensatory gratification for the sterile pedant I feared I had become. No, I thought. I was finding my way out of dualistic dead ends through the simultaneously critical and affirmative ideas Peter so often conjoined with “and.” I had once written about this productive interplay in Peter’s novel Die Wiederholung (Repetition) , describing the method as postmetaphysical metaphysics. Peter disdained abstractions of that sort. The afternoon hours passed without seeming to pass. The courses of food and pitchers of wine were ever-changing constants as the houseboat lifted and fell with the river’s insistent current. I was experiencing, I thought, a kind of standing now, a nunc stans in which memory was as present as the experience itself. Peter moved to an adjoining table to speak with the Serbian journalists. Žarko joined them as translator, a role he had played dozens of times over the years while traveling with Peter in what had been Yugoslavia. I realized that the wine had gone to my head like the scent of elderberries at the Hallesches Tor in ETA Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. Peter looked tired. The journalists asked their questions. Žarko translated them. Peter responded. Žarko translated the responses. Žarko looked tired as well. “Or” was my original conjunction. I spent two years in Germany as a Mormon missionary. I knew the truth and knew that other people needed it and I bore witness that if they would pray as I had, God would reveal the truth to them as well. My German improved and I began to read—Buddenbrooks, Mutter Courage, Der Steppenwolf . Nietzsche’s wild-eyed Zarathustra taught me that we create our truths instead of finding them. Lessing’s wise Nathan offered a parable in which the magic ring was mercifully lost. I too would essay a life on my own terms, I thought, on my own terms and yet in the context of the American, Mormon Volk I had left and that was still with me even as the minutes and hours of the afternoon on the Sava were stretched and enhanced by wine and tiredness. I admired the lively face of the man Žarko described as one of Serbia’s greatest living poets and marveled at Mladen’s heavy brows and enjoyed the animated interaction between Maja and Sophie as they smoked and talked and smoked. I watched red-haired Marija move around the room to take photos of the gathering. The German writer Peter Schneider attacked my translation of A Journey to the Rivers for presenting Peter’s work in a less controversial light than it deserved. I replied that Schneider either couldn’t read or refused to read. Criticize what is there, yes; but criticize what you put there with your simplistic and inflexible mind and you become the aggressive and stupid critic I was afraid Peter took me for when he called me Dr. Scott. I am a Germanist, a good one. I am also a writer, co-author with Žarko of two books described in Belgrade as a “two-seater without steering.” Couldn’t a person be both a writer and a critic? Was it the double role that made me a puzzle to Peter? When had I begun to write my non-critical work? Why had I done that? It was Žarko’s invitation, I thought. Žarko had asked me to contribute to a Belgrade journal and then to his anthology on childhood and then to the Flugasche issue on the painter Julije Knifer, and then the collaboration on the book Repetitions and later on Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary . It was Peter’s influence as well. His books engaged me, called to me even, made me want to understand, to pay attention, to weigh possibilities—and beyond the understanding to write, to write about myself. If I ever wrote a book about Peter Handke, I told myself as the houseboat rose and fell gently in the wake of a passing boat, I would write about the dialectical texts and certainly not about this afternoon on the Sava. I wanted to write a bout Žarko’s books as well. I would learn Serbian, I thought, Serbo-Croatian, so I could read my friend’s Tübingen, Emigracia, Knifer, Era, Strah od Emigracije, Pogled, Kafana , and so on. I had made that vow before. I would make it again. The river flowed past, heaving and falling like a mother’s breasts. Marija was brilliant and Handke looked tired and Sophie and Maja shared more cigarettes and Mladen gestured broadly and Matija Bećković said “hello” to me and in English which Mladen translated into Serbian I told the smiling poet that Žarko had said he was the best of all living Serbian poets. The poet winked and said Žarko always told the truth. I said I had known Žarko to lie on occasion. “Not in this case,” the poet replied. I was exhausted; time folded in on itself as did the food and the wine and Mladen’s huge head and Žarko’s solicitous translations and Sophie wincing with her back pain and another pitcher of wine and overlapping conversations translated back and forth from Serbian and English and French and German and even Spanish and the poet’s funny stories about another Serbian poet and soft cheese and onions and more wine. Peter asked the young journalist if she had a boyfriend and she said “yes,” and he asked for his name and she said “Vladimir” and he said “Vladimir?” “Vladimir!” and fish soup came and I asked Marija with her beautiful sharp nose and bright red hair about the man in blue eating alone at a separate table and she said he had a factory that made medals like the one the President of Serbia would give to Peter the next day and, she added with a smile, “he gives away a lot of medals!” I said, “he must be a very good President then” and she laughed and said “oh yes he’s the best there is,” and I suggested that perhaps the President would give Žarko and meedals too and she said it w ould surely happen but that it would probably require that we stay in the country just a few more days and I said we were leaving on Thursday and would that be long enough? and she thought perhaps it might require the weekend as well and the fish soup was followed by thick fish steaks accompanied by potato salad and the Sava flowed as slowly and powerfully as time while swallows dipped and rose outside the window and a photo of Angela Merkel handing a scholarship notice to the son of the houseboat owner hung on one wall and Peter joined the two journalists at another table for an interview Žarko translated and I stared at a photo of a man holding a huge fish in his arms and Marija asked the houseboat owner who said it was a Sava River fish like the one that lay in steaks in front of us and, raising a glass of wine to my lips, I realized that the cold spring meant that there were no orgiastic frogs croaking the way they had alongside the barge on the Danube that night fifteen years earlier when Žarko and I sat with the filmmaker Edgar Pera and drank Jelen Pivo and pissed through a hole in the restroom floor into the Danube and I thought of the book I had read by David Albahari, the one called Leeches , and about the nationalist antagonisms and conspiracy theories sucking nourishment out of the postwar Yugoslav state and we ate nicely toasted cream puffs and deliciously oily baklava and Maja told rapid stories in French while she and Sophie and Ljiljana shared stiletto-thin cigarettes from a pack that was giving out and I wondered why so many “j”s are required for the name Ljiljana and the Sava flowed unceasingly and I, politely, at least I was trying to be polite, asked Maja Kusturica what she did professionally and she asked me, in English, to repeat the question and when I did she raised her shapely eyebrows and expelled cigarette smoke through her nose and looked me in the eyes and said, “I suffer.” I wanted to laugh but smiled instead and she smiled back and time flowed on like the Sava River. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “The Afternoon on the Sava” is from the book We (On Friendship) , co-authored with Žarko Radaković and published in 2022 by Laguna Press in Serbian and Elik Press in English. We have been friends for three decades, with German as our common language and with Austrian author Peter Handke as our friend and inspiration. .................................................................................................................................................................................... SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next - The Gospel of Overconsumption by Scott Abbott Next

Tiananmen Mother for Zhao Ziyang by Michael Wells The Beijing breeze whispers mournful strophes. Tears like the mountain rains follow slopes to tributaries until they become one with the rippling waters of the Yangtze. I am a Tiananmen mother. My eyes have swelled with this sadness before. The wetness follows a path well-rehearsed. My nights are immense. I am a lone bare branch in a dark cold world. They replicate that June night etched in my soul over and over. My son stood in the square armed only with a vision and they came— The People’s Army. My son stood in Tiananmen Square, amid a sea of other sons and daughters and they came— armored tanks clanking along the streets into Tiananmen driven by fear, ordered by paranoia. Our sons and daughters toppled to the earth at their hands. Crimson crawling into every crevice of these ancient streets; a stain still upon us today. I cannot count the nights I have wept for my son since. Today, I weep for another. There is no official news but the Beijing breeze whispers again, this time for the death of the old man. There are guards outside my door. The lump in my throat is big, I cannot begin to swallow. That is how I know the truth. Guilt always gnawing at my heart. I could not help my son that June night. Again as I am helpless. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published by the Independent Chinese PEN Center. This is one of my favorite published pieces because of the story of its metamorphosis. I was at a writers retreat in a small community in Iowa and in a larger breakout group session we were instructed to write a small one to three act play. This was something I was not keen about doing. I think I recall saying out loud, I’m a poet not a playwright with a distinctly sarcastic tone. So I wrote what was on my mind at the time in a two act play. When we later read the work aloud it was very positively received. I came home from the retreat with it and a number of other drafts. I liked the concept and the subject and reworked it into a witness poem with a strong anmemorable impact. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL WELLS calls Kansas City home but claims the San Francisco Giants as his baseball team. He is an alumnus of the Writer to Writer program. His genre is primarily poetry. He likes his wine white and his coffee black. michaelwells.ink Next - And Tenured was Dropped from the Dictionary by Michael Wells Next