Volume 3 Issue 1
Featuring work by Xu Xi and Pete Fromm as well as writers from Bangladesh to Escanaba and Michigan,the newest issue of Silk Road raises the stakes in cross cultural dialogue. "Where are you from?" has become a more complex question to answer.Artists in this Issue
Elinor Benedict
Daniel C. Bryant
Susan H. Case
R.T. Castleberry
Srinjay Chakravarti
Mercedes Deambrosis
Karen Flagstad
Maureen Flannery
Pete Fromm
Charles Grosel
Richard Kenefic
Lee Kottner
Meredith Kunsa
Zoë Landale
Jackie Langetief
Donna Marbach
Gerald McCarthy
Andrew Merton
Joseph Millar
Gillian Nevers
David Parker
Peter Sears
Sarah Sloat
John Surowiecki
Kelly Talbot
Francisco Tharp
David Williams
Xu Xi
What the Day Has Done
by R.T. Castleberry
As the sun recedes,
ranges long across grassy median,
turns tree shade to deepening shadows,
daylight's outline sheds definition,
snarls like snapped phone lines.
A chemical musk of herbicide and fertilizer
floats the wet ground.
People draw close to their homes,
halogen's fierce light flaring behind falling curtains.
Men and women shed their work skins
for Indian gin, video bondage,
unease around the dinner table.
I don't remember happiness.
I remember the graffiti sprawl of rent strikes,
tents on fire in Homestead Park,
beds without sheets, the beggar's canto.
I remember struggle.
This is a border ward—
near the harbor, near an artist's hostel.
Asian tailors, convenience stores, coffeehouses
fringe the nearby streets.
A cop ends his shift, furtive as a burglar.
Runner's colors flash a track
between construction crane and security wire.
I enjoy the daze of my neighbors,
their possibilities blank as stretched canvas.
My bookcases are filled
with biographies of willful musicians,
half-read anthologies of Absurdist theology,
volumes that chart the curse of coincidence.
An egoist’s ephemera lays heaped on a table:
Temper stick, coup stick, Monte Carlo dice.
At my desk, a PC screensaver rolls and spirals,
a Nikon N60 sits by the scanner.
Photos from four lovers
are framed in key corners of the house.
Through the upstairs windows
I can feel the light of a dingy silver moon
as it rises nightly from the mercury waves.
Summer is an empty menace.
Thunder rolls. The rain passes.
Daughter of the Vine
by Meredith Kunsa
Working each grape-row to its end
she hummed an old hymn marking
the cadence of a hundred vines.
Come home, come home, calling
O sinner come home. Ache of her back,
stooping deep into the canes, twisting
the curved blade against a stubborn stem,
snipping heavy clusters clean.
Stakes of redwood crosses weathered
gray stretched shoulder to shoulder.
She pulled a burlap sack on which I slept,
baby, hauled row to row under the canopy
of leaves, planted close to the root
of the vine. Dust now frosts my lips,
rests lightly on my tongue. Sky bleached
in yellow grit, smells of old sea
beneath these silted fields. Grapes
hang down in hard green bunches;
by September their sugar will be fleshed
and ready for picking.
In homage I say Faith, my middle name.
Though Grandmother no longer labors
in the field, she knew what I would need,
and that is what I’ve come to claim.
An excerpt from A Spotless Marriage
by Mercedes Deambrosis, translated by Edward Gauvin
Their building seemed of a mediocre construction, but the neighborhood had its possibilities, and if the apartment wasn’t as well-lit as she might have liked—nothing put her in a better mood than a ray of sunshine—it was undoubtedly quieter than the ones overlooking the street, where trams passed with an appalling screech amidst a spray of sparks. But then there was the slaughterhouse.
She’d had a word about it with her husband: after all, a married couple should tell each other everything.
“The slaughterhouse scares me…”
He had laughed for a long time. And seeing him laugh that way, shaking with laughter, bits of saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth, his jaw strong and square, she didn’t think he looked like Victor Mature one bit.
An excerpt from To Body To Chicken
by Xu Xi
At each class, since she'd started these English lessons two months ago, her weekly assignment was to use a new word in a sentence. The first two weeks had been devoted to concrete nouns, and Teresa wondered whether “oil” could be considered concrete, given its liquid state. To describe what she did at work she said I help you push oil, which was how the industry's language translated from Chinese, but the teacher suggested that “rub” might be a better verb to use for “oil.” After four lessons, Teresa concluded that English was nothing like in the dictionary.
But as she signed out of work that night, I body you echoed in her head. She had wanted to ask the teacher earlier whether or not this was correct, but he was generally so morose and stern that she felt questions were not very welcome.