Blog / After Us

Foxes in the Time of Coronavirus

May 14, 2020 - By W. D. Ehrhart

(Photo by Anne Ehrhart)

Never saw the like of it before:
four sets of railroad tracks on one side,
four lanes of traffic on another,
parking lots on either side, barely
space for bushes and a patch of grass,
an early April day, sun shining—
and there, beside the fir tree, a fox.
There, another.  Smaller.  And another!
Three, four, five, six!  Incredible.
A vixen and her six small kits,
the mother keeping watch, aware of us,
fifteen feet away, my wife and I,
but not alarmed so long as we stood still,
her babies tussling, tumbling, racing,
pouncing, prancing, chasing one another,
having fun, though...

Trump Papers

May 12, 2020 - By Ward Schumaker

For years I earned my living as an illustrator, my work appeared in print with a story attached, words; so when I stopped illustrating and returned to fine art, it was natural for me to include words in that as well. But nothing political.

Broken Lines

May 8, 2020 - By Sharif S. Elmusa

(Photo: “Caged,”  by Achraf Baznani, used by courtesy of the artist)

Diary with Broken Lines to Wile Away Viral Time

Monday 6 April

Is Sharif Elmusa afraid of Covid-19?
Yes, Sharif Elmusa is afraid of Covid-19
(apologies to Charles Simic for the paraphrase,
hope he’s in good form).

Life and death are not the glass
half full or half empty.
Death is a broken glass.
I am afraid to be broken,
...

Plague Diary

May 5, 2020 - By Gonçalo M. Tavares

Editor’s note: What follows is a three-day selection from an ongoing project, one which has—in near simultaneity—been translated into several languages and published around the world. As Gonçalo M. Tavares’s English translator Daniel Hahn has remarked, the result looks “far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global as well as intimate,” an accumulating and cumulative poetic form, “something weirdly engrossing, at times distressing, at times strangely comforting.”

(by arrangement with literarische agentur Mertin Witt)

14 April
Some of the elderly are going out onto the streets in an ostentatious fashion.

People are talking about a kind of crazy...

Quarantined Sonnets

April 29, 2020 - By Tabish Khair

(Photo montage courtesy of Dejan Vekić)

Sex, Money and Shakespeare

 

In my second week of the lockdown in Denmark, a friend asked me to look again at Shakespeare’s sonnets for an academic anthology that she was planning. I am a fervent admirer of the sonnets, and when I started re-reading them yet again, I also started re-writing some of them with humor, irony and, gradually, satire. I stopped with 21 in all, which I thought was the right number, given the usual coronavirus quarantine recommendations. It started as a labor of love (and distraction), but gradually got branded by what was happening around me. As is the case, in my...