Excerpts from Issue 42/43 Filling in the New Address Book But rifling through the old one, choosing whom to preserve in your encyclopedia of associates, whom to let become obsolete— no room for them in your entire world. You little god, you, you puny pocket of omnipotence— how you throw people off the side of your dinghy-book, a tiny captain thinking, “This is dead weight.” Old girlfriends—doubly gone now. Old drinking buddies, married and laden with responsibility, that grand soberer. So you continue, you infinitesimal infinite one, scratching out the names of the dead, people you are coming from and never toward, tearing down street signs, phone lines, upheaving entire highways between you as you leave them out, their new and unfamiliar lives not any less full than if you included them. They are manning their own ships and, sorry little god, no room for you on their voyage either. It’s understood, no? How you’ve been heroes together in past lives, Ulysseses now full of uselessnesses— and why threaten any miraculous history, any great testament, with knowledge of how empty your current book of stories is? —BJ Ward La Dignidad Along furrows converging on emptiness, Stooped figures, the sun Lying like a boulder on each back. There is the dignity of fruit, and the stoic pride Of stones is equal to the dignity of weeds. But a man Who contains cries beside his sleeping wife, Holding the darkness of the room Off the faces of his children While the timbers of his back strain One by one down the tunnel of night, enormous Forming the pain. —David Sten Herrstrom The Explanation for it All was that he had a way with words and a sea anemone for a soul a whiff of him sent her flying off like a starling and sometimes he flew off the handle it was a kind of marriage made on earth of sparks and kindling what fun they had breathing down each other’s necks even during his impending death she did pirouettes in his direction and he, directionless took small steps towards himself in the wee hours of the night when the unexpected dons its red cloak and flares in a wild gesture full of accumulated sorrow —Susan Reiman Close the Curtain Quickly Close the curtain quickly while the day is still drawing with its soft grey patches —quickly, before the colors splay or the patterned cloth of our lives will be unpinned. We have come through the open scissors of the day —Emily Nguyen Theatrical Appeal from Sweet Agony We old actors will leave . . . . All of us. We repeated ourselves too many times, Do you remember how I murdered you? Do you remember how you murdered me? Murder turns into theater: the dead are now given the cue. But not to offend the murderers. We don’t need this kind of play. I appeal to you: all negative characters should show mercy to their positive counterparts. Retribution is not the way out. And the theater does not belong to us anymore. Let’s remove our corpses ourselves.— All corpses. Without tears and without posturing. Farewell. —Konstantin Pavlov Translated from the Bulgarian by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman