Fogged Clarity Podcast

¿Don’t you know none of us get work visas?

Not all of us can afford coyotes. Most

walk, swim, train, run through countries

that bribe us.

Let me repeat,

not all of us can afford to wait around the block

5am to 4 pm just to get denied

by the US embassy.

We curse gringos,

get fucked up, blow our pisto, then passout,

¿don’t you give a shit?

Every September 15

we miss marching through town,

singing your anthem with drums,

trumpets, and pom-poms.

We’re real hijueputas:

the buy-it-alls, the curse-it-alls,

the send-most-your-money-back-alls,

the most-problematic-

most patriotic

away-from-home-alls, the pessimistic-

most-pessimistic cerotes of the world.

Homeland,

you’ve got to learn to love

the Nahuatl-Pipil-Lenca blood

running through you.

You’ve got to know

you’ll never be

a gringo.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was nine, he migrated to the United States. He is a scholarship recipient from Breadloaf, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, VONA, and Yaddo; and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Zamora’s poems appear or are forthcoming in APR, Narrative, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of Meridian’s Editor’s Prize, CONSEQUENCE’s poetry prize, and the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Contest.

For the price of a tooth, you can buy two from the boy with no legs. One to keep, the other to let.

As in ancient times, the first slit open over a bowl of fresh water, the second dipped into the blood

of its twin. Water beading on the sheath of its beak. As a child, I observed the talons’ delicate

architecture. How bent, the weighted tendons snap shut, clamping the toes in place. Even in sleep,

a bird will not lose its perch. A sparrow found on the front steps sputters like a guttering flame

when fed from an eyedropper. The tiny body is limp in my hand, cold in the ground where I lay it.

So tiny you could crush its skull between two fingers. The crunch of wingbones as the pitted struts

collapse. On the sidewalk, a bloodied wing, opened as if in flight. The rest of the bird, incomplete,

hovering overhead. The curve of bone like a feathered cuff. None of us escapes unscathed. None of us

is free. It’s true what they say, that airborne, a bird’s bones fill with flight. Set free in an open field,

the bird thinking why not me. What’s bright against its throat, smeared across keeled breastbone.

Each wingbeat a scarlet flash. The pressed-together parts mirrored in the bottom of the bowl.

Halves opening outward like sky.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Mid-American Review, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices Fellow and has been a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, the Benjamin Saltman Award, and the Kundiman Poetry Prize.

—Jordan Davis and many others

There’s a teenager in an SUV, shopping mall, or nightclub

with an imaginary shotgun. The weapon belongs to him,

but he doesn’t—he can’t—know it’s there. That’s one problem

with an imaginary shotgun: if one is unaware of its existence,

one might feel safe enough to forget about the possibilities,

to hope the night sky is glorious, and the birds

are really singing. It’s late and as the streetlights begin

to buzz, one might hear: You are safe. I said:

there’s a kid with an imaginary shotgun,

and the men who claim to see it will return with real guns.

Think of “belief” as a type of flag. You plant it in the soil

of some uncharted territory, and it tells everyone who you are.

Suddenly, there are dirt roads around the flag. Little houses.

Then a city. Flags soaring in the breeze. This country.

You’ve made a choice; you have staked this as your own.

There are many lies one can choose to believe.

Say it another way: The men who claim they saw a shotgun,

haven’t seen anything. They have planted a flag, and will give

nothing back. What, exactly, do they believe?

They believe that they will be believed.

Many times I have chosen to believe the good of all men,

Providence, the road from here and where it goes.

I have been terribly wrong.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems: Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), and Contradictions in the Design which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November, 2016. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Currently, he’s the 2015-16 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

You are in Chechnya as I lick your glass

As if it’s not vodka in the glass, but the eyes

Of that Orthodox priest Anatoly

From the war zone in Grozny

The priest from your Chechen stories

Whose eyes “with the quiet, pure light”

Affected you so much you talked of

Nothing but, speaking to anyone &

No one in particular

Like what you said you did

Firing at whoever & only later

Who was who

I would listen to you now, but

The sobbing babushkas from your stories

Are banging their fists on the closed gates

Of the Grozny monastery

Inside your heart

Because Anatoly—

Already kidnapped

Already tortured

Already on the Internet

All ready to be googled into eternity

Inside his ditch

Your loneliness, my love, Raskolnikov’s

In his room that resembles a coffin

Kissing the eyes of a horse beaten to death

From a childhood memory

Inside the womb of moral responsibility

Because, Dostoevsky tells us,

It is necessary that every person have at least

somewhere to go

So, let me be there with you—

In the coffin with the eyes in it

Svetlana Beggs’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades and Columbia Poetry Review, and her stories were recently in Cleaver Magazine and Bartleby Snopes. A native of St. Petersburg, Russia she has an M.A. in Philosophy and lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter.

On a flight from somewhere to somewhere else,

the woman next to me vomits into a bag.

She’s polite about it, as if trying not to disturb.

The bag fills up, she seals it

in a separate Ziploc, and puts that in her purse.

Then she starts the process all over.

And this, Mike, reminds me of two years ago,

when you and I left Vermont, flew to Detroit and—

just before landing—heard the pilot’s voice

crackle over the intercom,

like the narrator in one of those documentaries

where everything ends tragically,

saying, Our landing flaps are malfunctioning.

And then, But don’t worry, we’re trained to land without them.

And then, There will be emergency personnel on the ground.

The quiet that followed filled the cabin like lake water

until everyone was still. I didn’t know

that kind of silence was possible.

I think about this, because as the woman next to me

heaves, again, I offer her a Dramamine to help.

She says, No. It’s not motion sickness. It’s my nerves.

She means she’s afraid. And I want to say something

comforting, like: I understand. Fear of flying is totally rational.

Many times, I thought I might die. Let me tell you about

the day my buddy Mike and I flew to Detroit and—

I don’t say this, of course, because trying to say something helpful,

but making everything worse, is a decent metaphor

for how I got to this point in my life.

She had trained for this. It takes practice

to have extra airsickness bags, Ziploc bags,

and an oversized purse. Just like it takes preparation

to land a plane without the appropriate landing gear.

And it takes a careful skill to shut up

when you know what you’re about to say

is like leaping with a parachute that will never open.

But Mike, how do we get to the good part of the story,

the part at the end where we don’t die,

if we don’t tell the part that comes before?

This too, is a map of my life: brief moments of elation

made possible only by the uncertainty that preceded them.

The plane that lands like a miracle bird,

the smoke that smokes upward from the brakes,

everyone silent, too scared to move. And then you,

one row behind me—you’re yelling, We’re not dead!

We’re not dead! We’re not dead! And like a flame,

the plane bursts into applause.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems: Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), and Contradictions in the Design which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November, 2016. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Currently, he’s the 2015-16 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Isako keeps careful chronicle of lost things. Mother. Father. Hairpin. During war Isako loses city

which is also now. Always some nation under foreign attack. Air raid sirens busted brick and

shrapnel. Isako’s History of Lost Things. Line after line persons lost or missing. Photographs of Isako

as child. As bride shrouded in high-toned luxury. Silk kimonos Meiji castle first daughter

discovered years later. Tale of first marriage recalled as confession on family scroll also lost. After

second marriage Isako scrapes rice from bamboo rice bowl rinsed with tea broth. Look what’s

become of you. Silver gelatin prints from previous life. Images never received. What Isako calls a

mystery. How can a life be lost if it was never yours.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Mid-American Review, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices Fellow and has been a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, the Benjamin Saltman Award, and the Kundiman Poetry Prize.

From some neighbor’s place, “Moon River.”

It trickles down the stairs & under our door.

It puts chopsticks in my chignon & spritzes you with Youth Dew.

In the Mansion of Many Apartments,

the 60s is a locked rec room we can’t get into.

They’ve changed the code. I guess

we just have to stand naked in the hallway

under the energy efficient light bulbs.

Modernity is the worst fate: it bumps you with its fist.

It kitches the apple blossoms & commodifies the owls.

There is so very little time left to love in the Grand Old Style.

If you’re coming to collect me, please do it quickly.

I’ve made you a highball. I’ve sung you a song.

Look. The Century’s Parade shimmies away from us:

flash of brass, pomp of parasol, heat haze.

“Moon River” tapers & we start to bicker.

What has our anonymous neighbor done to us this time?

And with us out of ice & so prone to golden age drinking?

I don’t know what a huckleberry friend is, but I suspect

it is something we hold too tight in the dark

when we know we should be rowing.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, as well as Scorpionica (New Michigan Press) and The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (forthcoming from Willow Springs Editions). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan and her PhD from the University of Houston, where she also served as the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast. Karyna is the 2015-2016 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

The question is whether to quell this

profligate book writing. Everyone’s

“putting out” books. We pulp our words

before pouring them right back in.

How many times can we fold the same bone?

Dad used to fill our slack with dumb conundrums.

He said: Would you rather empty industrial

grease traps for a living or be mute forever?

We said: Mute forever because Our Books, Our Books!

We meant: We will fit Love entirely inside them.

Follow up from dad: Would you rather write books

for a living or find true love with an oceanographer?

We said: Lichen! Sponges! Immortal Sea Stars!

We meant: Our words will break away & they

will become our children.

Our friend David, whom we only call when

we don’t really have enough time to talk, says:

Are you two married yet? He is quirky-alone

in a Minneapolis tenement. He’s given up

his love affair with book writing. Quell it,

he says. We get ten years, he says. Ten years

or two cars. Either win or grow up. Give up

this body of work, he says. It cannot love.

We get sick with some Romantic affliction.

For weeks we moon around the old house:

sleeping-in, doing errands with dad, stuck

in some regressive adolescent funk.

We break into our father’s bourbon.

We say: We must burn this empty gesture

at its open mouth. We say: Well said!

We mean: This is no way to make meaning.

Our father shows up in his bathrobe,

so we pass him the bottle. Look, he says:

if Love is the sicker of two sick,

sick puppies, what choice do we have?

We must bring it home and fix it.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, as well as Scorpionica (New Michigan Press) and The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (forthcoming from Willow Springs Editions). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan and her PhD from the University of Houston, where she also served as the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast. Karyna is the 2015-2016 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

They feared few things more than losing their dog, or their dog dying, whether by causes natural or unnatural. Sim, a third generation bee keeper, and his wife Tawnya, a design assistant, would probably rather lose their house, they loved that dog so much, and had experienced too many scares over the years. He’d been taken for a stray, dug under the fence, jumped over the fence, been hit by a car, hit by a bike, overdosed on chocolate, eaten gunpowder—and that’s just what they could remember (he was a favorite topic of conversation, which their few close friends tolerated). That he was still alive at all, going on ten, seemed an unaccountable fact, his existence borrowed against a fragile, unearthly collateral. Trinket’s a shelter dog, adopted by Tawnya before she met Sim, and she chose him because she felt (it sounds silly even saying this) chosen first by him. Skittish and mean, a plain Heinz 57 variety, a dog among dogs really, still, he stood out from the rest by not trying to impress her, sitting uneasily in the back corner of his cage as she greeted them down the line. It wasn’t until she got him back to her apartment that he went apeshit with barking, which drove a sleep-deprived third-shift neighbor into a rage (he eventually moved). Although she was unaware she was doing this, she chose a neurotic dog on purpose, chose a dog she’d have to excuse herself from company to go feed and care for, a dog so stranger- and especially male-averse she’d have a built-in reason not to invite would-be girlfriends or wannabe boyfriends over to her place. Tawnya had wanted a dog for years; she’d read that caring for a pet could relieve stress, especially for older (if you can consider mid-thirties old) people with anxiety, a promise that didn’t quite work out the way she intended, what with Trinket’s puppy-like energy and unexamined need to have his mouth occupied. Trinket did serve the purpose of getting her out on walks more—she lost ten pounds the first month—although she learned to be on high alert for anything the dog might get ahold of and destroy. He’d shredded several treasured books, a couple throw pillows, and gnawed to splintered bits at least one valuable Mexican wood carving before she learned how to proof the place against him.

It was in the aftermath of her nasty break-up with Gary, who preferred cats to dogs anyway (why did she ever trust him?), that she finally went down to the Humane Society and committed. She could only conclude that the mutt had been abused, which is how Tawnya understood the forces that had brought them together, that caring for this dog, and being cared for by it was a mutual act of cosmic mercy and solidarity, as she’d been abused by her uncle for over a decade growing up, pretty regularly, which her father knew about but could not bring himself to stop, this being his older brother, a guy who had to dominate in some way every room he entered and every person he met. It would be a cliché to say that Uncle Wendell had become a rapist because he himself had been raped—and not only by his Smithfield cousins but by a couple of bears in his platoon in Vietnam (this occurred in Cambodia), but then life can be like that sometimes, utterly predictable, working along formulaic story lines, a bad screenplay in the hands of a hack director.

It took Wendell’s unexpected death, murdered by one of his strung-out buddies, to end those slow marches to the barn attic, and although only sixteen it was then that Tawnya left home never to return, causing unspeakable heartache to her clueless mother. Well, this dog, Trinket (her given name had been Blanket—the dog was no Blanket—so she picked something close) came to be a reminder that nothing is as fixed as it seems, a lesson she needed to re-learn after Gary, an OCD porn addict whose beard was a trigger for her. By all rights and by design, Trinket should have scuttled her relationship with Sim (Aaron, actually,

In the bare upper branches

of a still-standing, colonial-era

hanging tree recruited, reputedly,

for intransigent young blacks, perch

three starlings, widely spaced, still

as the winter afternoon, silent

as a boy left lynched, stiff

in a hunkered-down way

that suggests they will

not fly away from this

strangled place until—

as they bear

hard witness to all things

here below—

they find reason and reason and reason

to sing.

Mark Belair‘s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East, and The South Carolina Review. His books include the collection, While We’re Waiting, (Aldrich Press, 2013) and two chapbooks: Night Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2012). His new collection, Breathing Room, is to be published by Aldrich Press this year.