There is a Fine Line Between a Party and a Riot
Most of my words sit like sugar-free mints at the tip of my tongue. Now I encounter athletic words. They push off my restraining grip and climb nimbly to the high board, vaulting, twisting, hurtling through space in showers of sparks. I lurk below, flat-footed. Tame words—cat, chair—wait politely with me on flash cards stapled to construction-paper-covered corkboards. (Overhead projectors may be called into play.) Off the high board comes tintinnabulation! Onomatopoeia! Can I corral their exuberance? My thought balloon lights up. The divers...
Read MoreTranslucent Fire
You are with Savage at a ramen stall amongst a dozen other foodcarts that dot the river on both sides, the pink and lavender lights of the love hotels and soapy brothels of the red light district smear across impossibly radioactive waters, the Hamanomachi district, known for the densest foot traffic in the city, thousands of wandering husbands off for a night with Russian strippers, hostesses who charge sixty-five an hour to pour them cheap whiskey, straighten their ties for them and hold false conversations with their fake eyelashes, they come back week after week bestowing bracelets and...
Read MoreVerde
Oh the joys of foreign blunders, you once witnessed an Australian English teacher attempt a deep, respectful bow to the President of the ESL company, he began his greeting not facing him but looking over his shoulder from the side, so by the time he was fully bowing, his ass was more or less directed to the President’s face, the deviousness of his action so brightly hued, the green silence of envy perseveres.
Read MoreAirport
When you first land at Tokyo’s Narita airport, you grab a coffee, there are two girls in short skirts sitting with their suitcases, Is that David Beckham? says one of them, motioning with chin in your direction, that’s when you know you’re going to have a good time in Tokyo.
Read MoreOther Tongues
my words are unravelled by wind shaken into sentences by a bluster of firs and I find myself hyphenated in a landscape never seen before here commas are more than rivers colons rise in fountained geysers while I paragraph between sand-dunes run from one period to the next semi- the next semi- who or what? rain sprays the land with brackets until I am italicized past retrieval and must return to the first word I spilled into the...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of March 4 (Language, Pt. 1)
Word cloud created at WordItOut.com. Love of language bonds writers together, and this week our contributors pay tribute to language, in the first of a two-part series. Joseph Dionne’s poem, “Seeing in French,” uses western nature imagery to explore the nuances of communicating in different languages. Irene O’Garden’s poem, “Puritan Spelling,” looks at how communication has changed with new technology. In “Pit and Pit,” a poem by Kenn Haas, homonyms become a metaphor for different intensities of love. In “Reading...
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