Desirée Jung: Featured Author

October 2014 | back-issues, poetry

Invisible Creatures

Orange laranjas, seis reais. The afternoon in Copacabana has sunscreen bottles and pharmacies. Near a tree, passengers wait at the bus stop. Secretly, I am naked in Portuguese. After a day at the beach, I drink coffee, and eat cheese buns. There is violence in Brazil, yes, but there is also so much more. Where I live, the snow falls occasionally, and the rain freezes my fingers. In spite of the dead trees, I desire the arrival of the summer, while I have fantasies of walking barefoot on soft sand, intimate with the invisible creatures of the heat. In that same life, I watch soap operas online and miss my family, when shopping in the organic supermarket. The privilege is to wish for tropical fruits while they still last. Hold onto the flavor as though they were pearls, unique and precious.

Latitude

The sun explodes in the canvas
of an unfinished painting,
a muscular entropy of the heart.

The brush is left alone in the dark,
as she lies naked in bed, empty
of imagination.

The latitude of an image
circumscribes the roughness of being.

Hunger for Tropical Things

She wakes up, acorda, with an intense necessity to devour tropical things. “In winter, the search for the sun is insana,” he says, finding it important to explain everything with statistics. “It is the foreigner’s syndrome,” he concludes, the paper in his hands. I don’t understand what you are saying. “If someone likes fruits, it is normal to miss pineapples,” she replies, “simple like that.” I feel much closer to myself when I have this conviction.

by Desirée Jung

Desirée Jung is a Canadian-Brazilian writer. Her work aims to stress the boundaries within languages. Desirée has published translations, fiction and poetry in Exile, The Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Antagonish Review, The Haro, The Literary Yard, Black Bottom Review, Gravel Magazine, Tree House, Bricolage, Hamilton Stone Review, Ijagun Poetry Journal, Scapegoat Review, Storyacious, Perceptions, Loading Zone, and others. Desirée has participated in several artist residencies, including the Banff Centre, in Canada, and Valparaiso, in Spain. She worked with Canadian poet George McWhirter in her M.F.A in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Moreover, her research and Ph.D. thesis in Comparative Literature was based in the works of Canadian poet P. K. Page. More information can be found on her website, desireejung.com

The Good Part

October 2014 | back-issues, poetry

I’d like a Sunday

like a Mary Oliver

poem, with a few

perfect words and

lots of white space,

and paper with

a high rag content

and maybe some

righteous soy-based ink.

It would be a leaf

in one of her spare

little collections, with

a fine old lithograph

from the public domain

on the cover,

one that recalled the idyllic

Transcendentalist woods

of Thoreau and Emerson

and John Muir.

I’d like to stare

at the few

perfect words

close up with

my glasses off

and appreciate the clean

edges of the fine

big print and feel

like I’m in church,

the good part, when

the church is empty

and there’s only

silence and the sound

of my own breath.

by Will Walker

Will’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alabama Literary Review, Bark, Crack the Spine, Forge, Passager, Pennsylvania English, Rougarou, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Slow Trains, Studio One, and Westview. His chapbook, Carrying Water, was published by Pudding House Press, and his full-length collection, Wednesday After Lunch, is a Blue Light Press Book Award Winner (2008). He received a bachelor’s degree in English history and literature from Harvard University, and over the last decade, he has attended numerous writing workshops with Marie Howe, Thea Sullivan, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Allen Shapiro, and Mark Doty. Will was also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and when not putting pen to paper, he enjoys placing bow on string and playing the cello.

John Taylor Pannill

October 2014 | back-issues, poetry

Subtle Way

A wave does not regret crashing on the shore

and a lightning bolt does not care

which tree it splits in two,

the same way the river

never notices the hill

it has carried away,

or the fog

the ship it has led

to a rocky grave.

You,

you are a force of nature

that sweeps over me,

that buries me entirely

and like snow piled high

on the empty cabin’s roof,

you don’t even notice me

collapse under your weight.

Mondays

This morning,

a car horn screamed

from the street below.

Standing in my room

wearing a towel

and with a toothbrush in my mouth,

I screamed back.

by ******@*ac.com">John Taylor Pannill