the crane wife
She is barely discernible from the color of snow except for the lick of red pressed against her skull. It looks as if someone has blessed her. Her body is shuddering, making soft breaks in an otherwise expansive stillness. The beak is half buried, weakly trying to toss off the cold. There is nothing in this place, a hollowed field of unbearably placid white.
Even his own presence is barely
marked, pressing only lightly against the snow. There is only her labored breath, the unmeasured rise and collapse of a feathered chest, a sudden impulsive twitch in the blade of a bent wing, its boning limp and destroyed. He picks her up, massages the wing back into place. She is warm where she is broken...(read more)
fiction, in Spanish, trans. Ángel Valenzuela published 2015
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EDITOR: René López Villamar
business trip
She presses up so close that she can feel the cold of the glass and then with instinctual force she bumps up against the mirror, greasing her imprint against the surface. She bumps against the mirror again, harder, feeling a redness in the push of her hip bones. Again. Harder. Again. Again, until her skin is marbling with deep colors...(read more)
sore
My doctor came once a week to treat bedsores. He was slight, anchored by his leather medicine bag. It was the medicine bag that I first noticed about him. Pockets and spaces for things that seemed too antiquated for modern medicine–amber vials with rubber tipped droppers, magnifying glasses, cloth bandages. The bag always slightly agape but never fully opened, a sliver opening into another world. My father did all the talking and then would seat himself in the corner of the room, his body bent forward and angled towards mine. There was always coffee resting tenuously on his knee. It stayed untouched. The steam dead in the cup...(read more)
tread
The current was strong but we knew this going in and we let it take us. I thought of the swimming lessons I took as a child. The instructor close to my ear saying with a wet tongue, “ Kick kick. My hand is here. Feel it? It is right here"...(read more)
pith
I picture two scientists in a laboratory—the space, their clothes, everything crisp white. Up to their knees in oranges. Valencia. Navel. Blood. Persian....(read more)
UNITS OF MEASUREMENT
I have been saving my hair in Ziploc bags, labeling in precise script the numeration of days: March 12, March 13, March 14. Measuring the loss, measuring myself as loss. There is something enormously pleasing about seeing myself, gathered, documented, consolidated–something so bodily in something so wonderfully plastic...(read more)
puppeteer
The body was nothing if not a destroyed thing, or a thing in the process of destruction, growing flaky and gone....(read more)
PHOTO CREDIT
PHOTOGRAPHER: CHANTAL ANDERSON
STYLIST: SAEHEE CHO
FLORALS: YASMINE FLORALS