Hunger Mountain

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Excerpts from Hunger Mountain’s Fall 2005 Issue, #7

October

a calendar of changes

before resolution ushers itself in, in the form

of rain, in the form of silences,

in the form of dozens of small temporary gods negotiating

all the shifts and lucid alterations in inclement

weather.

— Katie Peterson, The Year Seen Through One Night As If Pulled Through the Eye of a Needle

Elvis was weaving all over the road, swerving in and out of the oncoming lane, straddling the broken yellow line, dodging huge lumber-hauling sixteen-wheelers at the last possible second. You could have traced the route of our bus all the way up the highway by the honks and curses and flippingoffs of drivers in the other lane. Right then Priscilla would have been saying to him, “Slow down, King! Slow down!”

— Gerry Canavan, Ravine

But anybody who’s ever felt

The way the motorcycle goes on demanding

More and more speed,

The only thing the machine feeds on,

Can understand why all of us

Decided, in the end, to run the risk.

— Luis Miguel Aguilar, translated by Kathleen Snodgrass, Memo, Motorcyclist

Tang Li apologized, two intellectuals quarreling on this bridge in Chongqing, the rill of words. By now the PLA detail had reached them, their green uniforms stained black with sweat, several with shirttails hanging out. Ge couldn’t help but wonder who’d be most ready to die for these half-baked ideas they’d been throwing around, the intellectual or the soldier.

— Alex Kuo, Bridge

Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious memory,

give me that blue gaze in your dark eye, give me the devotion of your sleeping birds.

— Valerie Mejer, translated by Forrest Gander, From the wave, the shortcut

A daydream—a trance vision really—facing south toward Lower Manhattan as you work out on the NordicTrack. With each pull on the handgrips you draw the trade towers closer toward you, or perhaps it’s you that skis toward them. Somehow in the process, you enlarge until you’re huge—their scale—close enough to work your way between them and drape your arms around their shoulders. They smell of panic.

— Eric Darton, Notes of a New York Son

If all ages are equidistant to God, as Theopold von Ranke once said, then the opposite is also true: every age is also equidistant to evil, to good submerged and surrounded by the ether of chaos and emptiness. When I made this connection in some winding back alley of Krakow, I realized that I myself was implicated in this chaos and felt the reality of my own darkness flow by in a strong current of pettiness, self-interest, fear and loathing.

— Robert Vivian, Walking With Marisa