From STATE OF SIEGE
Mahmoud Darwich
Translated by Marilyn Hacker from the French version of Saloua Ben Abda & Hassan Chami in Le Monde Diplomatique

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A woman said to a cloud: cover my beloved
Because my clothing is soaked with his blood.
          ***
If you are not rain, my love
Be a tree
Green in its growing season, be a tree
Be a stone
Drenched with the dew, be a stone
If you are not a stone, my love
Be a moon
In your beloved's dream, be a moon
[A woman said this
to her son at his burial]

Joe Henry Addresses the Nation: The GobQ & A
Steve Almond

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At 41, Joe Henry is hardly an overnight sensation. Over the past fifteen years, the Michigan native has made eight records, ranging from the rootsy ballads of Short Man’s Room (1992) to the moody, groove-driven sound of Trampoline (1996). His most recent effort, Scar, is a hypnotic blend of jazz, soul, funk, & Latin music.
     Henry’s albums still sell a fraction of his old high school classmate, Madonna (who also happens to be his sister-in-law). But his work has attracted a cult following which includes some of the finest musicians in the world, including pianist Brad Melhaus, Ornette Coleman, & Marc Ribot. More recently, Henry has made his mark as a producer, manning the boards on Solomon Burke’s new record, Don’t Give Up On Me, for which he very recently won a Grammy.
     He spoke to Gobshite Quarterly from his home in South Pasadena.

The Love School
Elizabeth Knox

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     It was a sick season, a December with no rain and a hard frost every night. Aunt saw it coming and took to dressing like the seeding flowers she said no one would see that summer. She would come down to breakfast in her ruffled collar and skating dress. She said you had to let nature know you’d noticed, but we surmised that she was signalling someone. Aunt was out in the world for the first time since she had come to nurse our dying mother, and then to nurse us – the sickly family. She had taken a job as a relieving teacher in the School of Life. She would set off in the morning, getting up from the breakfast table, big-hipped and knock-kneed, rubbing her palms on the backs of her thighs to iron out the crease from the edge of the dining chair. She was getting on, and her flesh – at least – was more impressionable than it had once been. Everything left its mark: the edges of chairs, sheets wrinkled by rivulets of sleep, the elastic in her panties. Things were hard for Aunt. She wasn’t ever strong – by her own confession, for, after all, none of us were. We were a family whom circumstances had bled, purged, and sweated. Our family was a fine old thing, sensitive to changes in its environment – and, Aunt said, our country had made a poisonous mess of itself.

D. C.
Les Murray

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Manifesto for All Future Movements
Rick Moody

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We believe groups will appear.
We believe that everything prior is worthless,
We believe the bodies will fall where they may.
We believe that logic is very bad for you.
Above all, speech seems to us the main instrument.
We are not saying that we don’t have the most lofty ideas.
We believe forced feeding leads to excessive thinness.
We think that the suppression of individuality is complete...

Please
Julianne Ortale

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Give me your hand.
No, I want your whole hand. I want your fist.
Yes, here.
I bought some lubricant. I’ve been thinking about it.
There on the nightstand. Put some on your fingers. Rub it on your fist. On your wrist. That’s right.
Yes...

Whence It Is Deduced That There Are Other Beings Equally Happenful
Luisa Valenzuela
(translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler)

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THE WOLVES

     They always hunt in packs and the full moon helps by showing them the tracks of a good prey. When it snows, or still better when it’s cold out, they sit in their solitary unconfinement in front of macrobiotic eateries from which issues the delicious odor of sesame oil and whole-wheat bread, which form the staple of their victims’ diets. They love them like that, wrapped in furs and without a gram of impurity, not even under their fingernails. They love them and they unlove them, of course, that’s why they rip them apart with their kisses and then sire in them children who will be wolf cubs as blond as the sesame oil and whole grain of their dietary rituals.