Tag: WarVeteransIssuesP

Mask 13

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Annemarie Neary
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

They had barely finished the introductions when he asked about the war. The endgame, the likely victor, things no Ukrainian cared to discuss with strangers.  

‘I wish I knew,’ she said. Usually that was enough. 

‘But what do you think?’ 

She managed to keep her tone level. ‘I try not to think. But I’ll do a good job here regardless.’  

She didn’t like his smile any more than she liked his question. But she did want the job. A friend who was still in Kyiv had spotted the ad online. These things are almost never advertised, so Olena emailed right away with her CV.  

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Tilting

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Matt Cantor

It’s been a full year, now.  

It’s October 7th. 

I stand at the platform at Kenmore, waiting for a D-train so I can get home to have dinner with my parents. I’m not waiting very hard. They’re going to ask all sorts of questions about what I’ve been working on.  

“Don Quixote,”  I’ll tell them.  

“Hasn’t somebody already written that?”  they’ll ask me.  

“Lots of people have already written lots of things.”—like it means anything, or makes any sort of difference in the direction that I want it to.  

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On Language, Bombs, and Other Things That Exist

.Reading time 18 minutes.

by: Kimberly Grey

As poets, we often assemble language to disassemble meaning—or we disassemble language to assemble meaning—and this is all an effort to translate the ordinary (a pair of socks, the name of that place, subway car, chair versus shadow, the front of a sparrow, something afloat like a naked rock) into an extraordinary textual or speech act. The result, we hope, is something new and transformative.

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