by Catalina Bartlett
“Dad let me stew in the holding cell for eight hours. By then, the vomit had dried on my tee-shirt, and I smelled like the rest of the drunks in the holding tank. I emerged with bloodshot eyes and an unrepentant heart.owadays, Twitter and Facebook users would write, “hashtag, sorry/not sorry.” But there was no Internet, only carbon copies, and Dad had to sign a stack of them to get me released. He didn’t hug me, even after I’d changed into the shirt that I’d asked him to bring. But I told my dejected self that he was just trying to preserve his bad-cop image in front of his other bad-cop friends, that he was just an embarrassed father trying to be cool. ”
TAL’-S-GO GAL’-QUO-GI DI-DEL’-QUA-S-DO-DI TSA-LA-GI DI-GO-WHE-LI / BEGINNING CHEROKEE
by Qwo-Li Driskill
Find a flint blade
Use your teeth as a whetstone
Cut your hair
Talk to shadows and crows
Cry your red throat raw
Learn to translate the words you miss most:
dust love poetry
Learn to say home
by Melissa R. Sipin
“From within her taxi, the girl takes in the half-built and skeletal structures, the night lights, and loud honks from cars that make Manama feel like home. The pink, beige, and gray highrises are decorated with pictures of three bearded men: they shout at her, remind her she is a foreigner, an outsider, a woman. Their curved, neon letters accompanied with English translations remind her of Manila, the dark and impoverished, loud city her father escaped from when he was her age, 25 years old, still young and yearning.”
Rich Villar
“A black bear was on the run in Paterson, New Jersey. He appeared, seemingly from nowhere, along the bank of the Passaic River in Pennington Park. At some point, he jumped in and started swimming, seeking refuge finally on a small island inside the river itself, just south of the Glover Street Bridge. This is what the reporter in the helicopter said, as I watched this bear chilling on the aerial camera, lying down on the tall grass, clearly aware of others watching her, or him, but not caring enough to run, not yet. The reporter did a lot of saying from her perch in the helicopter. She said that authorities were unsure how the bear got there, “To Paterson, of all places.”
