A pig in the shape of me

Two poems by Kathleen Ma, plus new Mentions

Kathleen Ma’s Issue Sixteen poems conjure a gecko trapped in amber for 54 million years and a cow named Desert munching grass in 1953. In the grand sweep of cosmic time, Ma suggests, our essential animality becomes easier to perceive. Read her poems below.

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Battle Creek | Poetry

KATHLEEN MA

A pig in the shape of me goes to the gas station.
Two ninety five is not bad for the Midwest, pressed
under great slabs of sun. Take it all in, what
you know and what you don’t. Don’t get it twisted
I would never in my life be the mayor
of Battle Creek, Michigan. Open your eyes!
You think it’s slick to imagine me so tall, so cool.
Let me out of the barn with sun-rimmed eyes.
In truth, I have no recollection of what it means:
three pink ducks left in the rain, groveling.

I don’t know what you want from me. This gecko
has been trapped in amber for 54 million years! Ask
the hollow of the tree where it came from,
what it saw. I am sweating like my pig because
you won’t tell me anything at all. The Kellogg factory
stands for not even you. We had a box with Tony’s
glossy face and his arm around my shoulder. Scourge!
You’ll let me rot in my own heart.
You want to touch my cheek like I’m
the mayor of Battle Creek, Michigan.

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Sonnet for Desert | Poetry

KATHLEEN MA

with Sammy Prentice

The cow named Desert sheared the grassland
with grateful eyes. She reeducated the
soil’s hardness. She would later be reborn
as the lake’s surface. For now it was 1953.
Her best friend was the suffering sea. A sturdy
youth named Yiping led her up the mountain.
Is he still my uncle? With every year,
cuts of time raise him from dust. Me —
I will wrest this life into what is not nothing.
Send a hangnail into exile! An empire declines;
I go to shop again, prepared to be reborn
as an aluminum mop in the calloused hands
of a Henan tailor as he sees his tired face
mirrored in soapy water, on the factory floor.

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Issue Sixteen’s extremely abbreviated reviews also find animals in unexpected — and perhaps unwanted — places. Read on for a pro-bug barback meme account, a full-time consumer of opium, an abyss that was once a mountain, Sigma Mussolini, and an onslaught of memories.

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Campari red

FOOD SCIENCE

In 2006, the Campari Group announced that it would stop using cochineal insects to give the company’s namesake liqueur its trademark reddish hue, citing “uncertainty of supply.” In the U.S., Campari switched to a vegan dye, which may or may not include Red 40 — an additive HHS Secretary RFK Jr. hates almost as much as vaccines. It remains to be seen whether Campari will follow other multinational food and beverage corporations, which have informally agreed to phase out artificial dyes. But the time is ripe for a campaign to reindustrialize American insects, and, as the pro-bug barback meme account @moverandshakerco put it, “make Campari bugs again.”

Lev Mamuya

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Prins

BOOK

The narrator of César Aira’s 2018 novella has left behind a lucrative career as a writer of genre fiction to become a full-time consumer of opium. “The human is no more than a format, the content is left up to chance,” he thinks. The same goes for the novella, which recounts dreamlike stories of getting high, having sex, and being the one person uniquely situated to save a world teetering on the edge of oblivion. The world of the book, for all its secretive sages, potent substances, and labyrinthine architecture, is knowable, at least to César Aira. It is Buenos Aires. The novella is, so far, less so for Anglophone readers: it has not yet been translated into English.

Brian Harkin

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Rio Tinto Kennecott Visitor Experience

TOURISM

Just south of Salt Lake City, you can ride a six-dollar company shuttle to the edge of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the largest open-pit excavation site in the world. (Signs along the way warn workers to “control the hazards.”) Like “Spiral Jetty,” the region’s more famous earthwork, the copper mine will leave you thinking about scale; from three Empire State Buildings up, ore-toting trucks appear planktonic. But even more mind-bending than the view is the experience of reading about Rio Tinto’s “environmental stewardship” on their website right after staring into an abyss that was once a mountain.

Colin Lodewick

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Mussolini: Son of the Century

TV

According to director Joe Wright, every camera used to shoot this eight-part series bore a sticker that read “this machine kills fascists,” a nod to the famous inscription on Woody Guthrie’s guitar. But the finished product lacks the moral clarity of, say, Guthrie’s “Tear the Fascists Down.” Rather than mocking or belittling fascists, Wright chose instead to explore the libidinal allure of squadrismo through sequences of gratuitous blackshirt violence set not to folk but to EDM. If there’s a critique buried somewhere in here, it’s been lost amid the social media flood of what can only be described as Sigma Mussolini fan edits.

Tiffany Berruti

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Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach

FICTION

António Lobo Antunes offers Greater Lisbon’s answer to The Sound and the Fury’s Compson family, complete with its own self-drowned firstborn, near-mute youngest child, and middle son of the usual type (estranged, violent, involuntarily celibate). The Caddy stand-in, and only daughter, narrates a final visit to her childhood summer home. Deftly rendered in English by translator Elizabeth Lowe, the novel is a nonlinear, minimally punctuated onslaught of memories, interspersed with refrains of unattributed dialogue that give voice to furniture, plush toys, and blackbirds. When the protagonist bids farewell to a grove of pine trees beside the house, their parting message may well echo the sentiment of most readers at the book’s end: “How mean of you to leave us.”

Jamie Ewer

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Images by Roxana Kenjeeva