There’s a black bear
in the apple tree
and he won’t come down.
I can hear him panting,
like an athlete.
I can smell the stink
of his body.

Come down, black bear.
Can you hear me?

The mind is the most interesting thing to me;
like the sudden death of the sun,
it seems implausible that darkness will swallow it
or that anything is lost forever there,
like a black bear in a fruit tree,
gulping up sour apples
with dry sucking sounds,

or like us at the pier, sombre and tired,
making food from sunlight,
you saying a word, me saying a word, trying hard,
though things were disintegrating.

Still, I wanted you,
your lips on my neck,
your postmodern sexuality.
Forlorn and anonymous:
I didn’t want to be that. I could hear
the great barking monsters of the lower waters
calling me forward.

You see, my mind takes me far,
but my heart dreams of return.

Black bear,
with pale-pink tongue
at the center of his face,
is turning his head,
like the face of Christ from life.
Shaking the apple boughs,
he is stronger than I am
and seems so free of passion—
no fear, no pain, no tenderness. I want to be that.

Come down, black bear,
I want to learn the faith of the indifferent.

Henri Cole

I love you like ladybugs love windowsills, love you
like sperm whales love squid. There’s no depth
I wouldn’t follow you through. I love you like
the pawns in chess love aristocratic horses.
I’ll throw myself in front of a bishop or a queen
for you. Even a sentient castle. My love is crazy
like that. I like that sweet little hothouse mouth
you have. I like to kiss you with tongue, with gusto,
with socks still on. I love you like a vulture loves
the careless deer at the roadside. I want to get
all up in you. I love you like Isis loved Osiris,
but her devotion came up a few inches short.
I’d train my breath and learn to read sonar until
I retrieved every lost blood vessel of you. I swear
this love is ungodly, not an ounce of suffering in it.
Like salmon and its upstream itch, I’ll dodge grizzlies
for you. Like hawks and skyscraper rooftops,
I’ll keep coming back. Maddened. A little hopeless.
Embarrassingly in love. And that’s why I’m on
the couch kissing pictures on my phone instead of
calling you in from the kitchen where you are
undoubtedly making dinner too spicy, but when
you hold the spoon to my lips and ask if it’s ready
I’ll say it is, always, but never, there is never enough.

Mối quan hệ giữa chúng ta giờ đã chuyển sang một bước ngoặt khác.

Những lời ngọt ngào trao nhau năm xưa giờ đây nhanh chóng trở thành những lời đắng cay. Những cuộc thương lượng lý trí giờ đây chuyển sang những trận gây gổ phi lý.

Những cảm xúc năm xưa giờ đây chỉ còn lại những mối trao đổi. Giữa chúng ta giờ đây chỉ còn lại trách nhiệm? Mai sao trách nhiệm không còn nữa lấy gì níu kéo lại.

Tại sao chúng ta làm đau lòng nhau bằng những lời nói? Chẳng lẽ giờ đây phải đối mặt nhau như kẻ xa lạ để tránh né sự bực bội và khó chịu?

Những lời tâm sự từ nay đành khép lại. Ngoài những câu nói cần thiết sẽ giữ lại những nỗi niềm riêng. Dù trách nhiệm hay trách móc, hy vọng hạnh phúc không mong manh như lời nói.

To carry the child into adult life
Is good? I say it is not.
To carry the child into adult life
Is to be handicapped.

The child in adult life is defenseless
And, if he is grown up, knows it,
And the grownup looks at the childish part
And despises it.

The child, too, despises the clever grownup,
The man-of-the-world, the frozen,
For the child has the tears alive on his cheeks,
And the man has none of them,

As the child has colors, and the man sees no
Colors or anything,
Being easy only in things of the mind;
The child is easy in feeling—

Easy in feeling, easily excessive,
And, in excess, powerful,
For instance, if you do not speak to the child,
He will make trouble.

You would say the man had the upper hand
Of the child (if a child survive),
But I say the child has fingers of strength
To strangle the man alive.

Oh, it is not happy, it is never happy,
To carry the child into adulthood.
Let children lie down before full growth
And die in their infanthood,
And be guilty of no one’s blood.

Stevie Smith

I drank,
my arteries filled with fat;
the ventricle went lax
and a clot stopped my heart.

Now I sit
in St. Petersburg sunshine.
No whiskey;
wearing a girl’s heart.

My blood has adopted a child
who shuffles through my chest
carrying a doll.

J.D. Reed

On Sunday evening, I saw on Marketplace that someone was selling 10 pairs of used skis and 5 pairs of used ski boots for $0. The skis in the photos looked decent. It was too good to be true.

Nevertheless, I messaged the owner, but I didn’t get a response. I knew I had to compete with lots of people; therefore, I offered some cash. The owner replied. I told her I could come right away, but a thunderstorm was coming. Then we scheduled it for Monday. She told me that if I changed my plan, I needed to let her know. She had tons of inquiries. I believed her. That was why I offered some cash.

Now I have so many pairs of skis in my little shop. I am going to need to spend some time tuning them up. I still have the whole fall to do. Let’s see how far I get. With the amount of time I spent, I need to up the price a bit.

Selling used skis had been an eye-opening experience. I had never done any sales before. I make money mostly from typing on my computer. For this side hustle, I had to work with my hands. I had to shoot the video and photos. I had to write the descriptions. I had to reply to potential buyers. I had to meet with them.

Making money with your own hands isn’t easy. I don’t make enough profits to justify the time I spent on tuning, but it would be great for the kids to make extra money. I showed Đạo and Đán how to tune up so they could make some extra money, but they didn’t want to do it. Oh well, I tried!

I had always wanted to translate Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go into Vietnamese, but I hadn’t found the time. Fortunately, Nhã Thuyên beat me to it and she had done the justice in capturing Dr. Seuss’s uplifting prose. In this typographic sample, I wanted to showcase both languages side by side. I also keep the color scheme from the book. Since the focus is on typography, I left off the illustrations. The sample page is typeset in NaN Success, designed by Jérémy Landes, and NaN Serf, designed by Daria Cohen, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, and Florian Runge. Now you can enjoy Dr. Seuss’s classic in Vietnamese as well.

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical, your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission—

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound—
for the burying of her small red wound alive—

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call—

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off

Anne Sexton

Jim Jefferies is back and still a master at his craft. I was hoping for some political jokes from him, but he took a quick swipe at Biden. Most of his materials were on gay. To please his wife, he hired a homeless and blew him. Of course it was a joke, but it was also a stretch too far. This Netflix Special was OK for me.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting
Secondhand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same; that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled;
the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little, and listen—
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Galway Kinnell