Tag: Travel

It’s Not Always About the Lemmings

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Olga Maslova

Sometime last century in Kharkiv, father
and I fled the melting August pavement,
bribed the conductor of a sold-out train.
He jammed us in the luggage racks,
and we took off to the Black Sea.

The moving furnace spat us out somewhere
in Kerch, the easternmost town in the Crimea
two hundred miles from sandy beaches, magnolias,
and pine trees,
streets lined with vendors selling buttered corn
charred shish kebabs and chacha. Predawn Kerch

was drab and empty, last night’s drunks
scattered on the streets like seals in their puddles,
seagulls feasting on rotting fish. At the port
we made a deal with a captain of a cargo bulker
Father paid the fare with his life stories, and kept
the crew awake.

I sat 12 hours next to the cockpit
                                                            staring
    at the horizon changing colors
                                                                    from pink
                                to blue
                                                   to pink again
                        to black

till the evening Yalta embraced us
like an old friend at the party:
a little tipsy, a little horny, determined
to dance all night
under shooting stars

                * * *

An arctic snowy owl arrived
in the south of France last Wednesday
3000 miles away from home. Her baffled face
was captured by the paparazzi. British scientists
as their rituals dictate, had offered an explanation:

It’s all about the lemmings:
The owl was following the lemmings
The spike in the lemming population
had lured the hungry bird

There is one person
who really knows what happened—
the captain of the Greenlandic freighter
the stowaway had boarded, heading south

But he won’t tell

                     nor will the owl

                                   nor the lemmings.

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A Little Longer

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Matthew Thorburn

Featured Art: Polar Chroma Midnight by John Sabraw

“Tickets, please,” he calls out, “Tickets!”
and I think, Hang on, I know him,
the conductor who shuffles toward me
down the aisle, this big guy, pink-
cheeked, coppery buttons on his dark
blue suit, his blue cap with a short
sharp brim jammed down over reddish
hair, shirt collar disappearing

beneath his curly red beard, look how
he keeps his feet set wide like
a sea captain, sways in the nonplace
of our constant motion, as I heard a French
philosopher call it, the steady-as-she-goes
of this racketing NJ Transit train,
his ticket nippers going click-click,
click-click, poor morning light catching

the pixie dust of ticket snips sprinkled
behind him as he calls out again,
“Tickets, tickets,” coming closer now,
not asking but naming what he wants,
and there’s something I want
to tell him after this shock of recognition,
startled awake by a world
made strange again, but is this

really the place to say, You know,
you look just like Joseph Roulin the postman,
Van Gogh’s friend, his neighbor he painted
five or six times back in 1889 and you
can go see down in Philly at the Barnes,
then relate how Roulin sorted the mail
each day at the train station in Arles
where Van Gogh used to go to send

paintings home to Theo, how Roulin
cared for him when he cut himself,
wrote letters to his family, welcomed him
into his own, made Van Gogh’s life
a little better, probably a little
longer, though the conductor I imagine
is not a son of Arles, though maybe
of Manalapan, but up close I see

his badge says JOE, his sapphire eyes 
are filled with delight, filled with
deep light, just the way Van Gogh painted
them, as I’d like to tell him
in this moving moment we share
when he says “Tickets” once more and
then—Click-click—punches mine
and then—“Here you go”—hands it back

since I’ll need it to board the AirTrain
at Newark, but because this train
keeps rattling along, he keeps walking,
calls out again, clicks his nipper
once, twice, just because, and that’s when
I spot it, there at his coat hem, how
it glints and burns in the dusty light,
that smudge of sunflower yellow.

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I Go Back to Mykonos 1976

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Mykonos” by Maria Karalyos

                                                                             —after Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937”

By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him.
She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance.
I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk
into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them
that, together, they’ll create a new generation
of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl,
the one who, forty years later, will see him, run
to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat
of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother,
in the words of the great North American philosopher,
Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.”
But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before
I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage,
and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War
has ended, but here I am standing
at the window, watching while they meet,
both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move
from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone,
in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance
he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare
into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look
at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay
at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit.
But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the
bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in
my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go.
But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch
the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right
to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep:
holding onto each other until death.

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Train Prayer

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Indulge by Felicity Gunn

In Denver all days end standing up
packed like dried fish dry-humping
each other on the H Line. Some
passengers in their drunken wobble
or even in their haze of sobriety
pull down hard on the rubber handles,
the ones meant for standing,
the ones that swing dumbly above
our heads. They think this action
stops the locomotive but the train
is automated, stopping itself
at Broadway then Osage, Lincoln Blvd.
Since the train, as it always does, stops—
the travelers learn to keep tugging
& I can’t help but think this is how
prayer works. Like when I prayed
to a god I don’t believe in that your
morphine drip might soothe the wounds
that chemotherapy would not
& how I swear it worked sometimes
but didn’t others & yet in my drunken
sobriety I believe that it was me
who eased your pain, that it was my
failed pleas that bleached your blood.

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Not the Wolf but the Dog

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jacqueline Berger

Featured Art: Two Human Beings. The Lovely Ones by Edvard Munch

Not the zebra but the horse;
not buffalo but cows,
maybe camels,
who traded the wild for the stable,
a stall lined in straw,
the house with wee gables and eaves,
their name over the door—
Biscuit, Coco. Snowball, Ranger.
Traded the hunt for the daily bowl and dish,
predators for owners, collar and leash;
agreed to be a tool—plow or cart
or confidant—to breed in captivity.

So when the man in the elevator
at the Venetian holding his cardboard
tray of coffees and muffins
heading back to his room
says to no one in particular,
but most likely to the other man,
the three of us strangers,
I better get something in return for this, 
he means fetching breakfast
so his wife can sleep,
I better get something for all of this, 
gesturing with his head,
meaning the hotel, the dinners and shows,
I think about women
who prowl the midnight streets
in their staggering heels,
breasts like missiles
because they’d rather be feral than kept.
And about men who gave up
wilding to name their offspring,
their known code continuing on forever.

I’m carrying my own tray
of coffees and muffins,
will soon press the card against the lock,
open the room, rip off my clothes,
throw back the three hundred
thread-count sheets, waking
my husband. He’s met someone new
and now wants both
of his lives at once.
He can sleep later. These untamed
weeks, we’re savaging,
flesh against flesh, ravishing
our marriage.

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