by Jim Carruth

Faking It
          (Odontochile spinifera, Barrande 1846, trilobite,
          Eifelian Devonian, Morocco)
          “Faking trilobites is not a new invention”
                          How to identify fake trilobites
                          Jens Koppka, Heiko Sonntag and Horst Burkard

How do I know who you are or claim to be
when pretence can reap such great rewards ?

Am I right to be suspicious seeing there in front of me
not the dull black lustre I find in many of your kind

but a variety of reds and browns, unnaturally shiny,
devoid of the cracks, terrace lines on free cheeks

that would mark the stresses of your journey to date;
tubercles, nodes, ridges and pits all smoothed over.

I can see it in your eyes, those individual lenses.         
Your little bubbles on the surface are part of the act.

Even this hard bed you lie in doesn’t ring true to me.
I’m told using a UV–light might expose what is hidden

or taking a solvent to your short body reveal more.
Some touching up does not cross the line into fraud.

I could bite into you right here and now to test you–
a fake will always feel softer on the teeth than truth.

If all else fails a slice in half with a diamond blade
will once and for all reveal the void beneath the show.

by James McGonigal

Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888 –1963):
A Scottish Suite       Spanish with Glasgow Scots

God the Faither hauds the keys
            tae aa wir belly–buttons. [p110]

            El Creador guarda las llaves de todos los ombligos.
            The Creator keeps the keys to everyone’s navel.

Hae a luik at this x–ray o yer fit — thae banes are shairly built
            tae gie some loon a kick up the bahookie. [p110]

            Al ver la radiografía del pie se ve claramente que sus huesos estan
            parados para dar puntapiés.
            This x–ray of the foot clearly shows bones designed to deliver kicks.

The nummer 6 is in the faimily wey. [p63]

            El 6 es el número que va a tener familia.
            6 is the number which is going to have a baby.

Sittin doon at his concert grand, the dandy virtuoso
            tries oan the keyboard’s evenin gloves fir size. [p110]

            Playing the piano the pianist dons the elegant gloves of the keys.
            Al tocar el piano el pianista se pone los elegantos guantes de las
                 teclas.

The sea’s shouders are nae fashed by ony draps o rain that faa
                        oan thir aa–weddir gear. [p137]

            A las olas no les importa la lluvia, como se tuviesen impermeable.
            Waves don’t mind the rain at all, as if they were wearing waterproofs.

Kirkyaird mune. The yin stane hereaboots that hauds nae epitaph.

            La luna es la lápida sin epitifio.
            The moon is the gravestone that lacks an epitaph.

by James McGonigal

One of these years
            he might miss not only her birthday
                        but the date of her death. Waking at five

to slap barefoot through the half–dark
            and contemplate mist easing up the glen
                        to brush fleece and cattle rumps, the ponies

grey–bearded now, stiff–legged
            as he peered out for their shadows grazing —
                        She came back to me last night

                        in the deep blue dress with hair adrift
            across one shoulder as she always used to
like to wear it with that dress. Long light

falling across the dream. Outside
            burn waters tsked and bustled
                        sweeping word after word away.

glossary
glen: valley
burn: stream

by Iyad Hayatleh

Return       English Version

It’s four am
my heart sneaks towards alleys of Damascus
like a Sufi deer in love with a white dove
like the soul of my father
at a wild dawn

He looks for an eight year old boy flying his kite
for a country he had seen only in dreams
he stumbles into a string  dangling
from the middle of a sky addicted to the sorrow
for six decades and the seventh to come

He stops at the fourth house on the heart side
and hugs my shadow which has long remained over the doorstep
he opens a brown door
ascends two stairs
and opens another brown door

A smell of morning coffee which spilled
on a straw mat in a cry of memory, awoke in his lungs
the tattered curtains smile joyously at his return
he whispers: shush
and slips left
also to the heart point
and kneels over a bed
where the back of its queen has successively broken by farewell nights
and the five tales of exile

He stares at the face of an old woman drowning in the sea of  worries,
for seven children, twenty two grandchildren, three homelands,
and a refugee camp
and long lingers reciting his tears

Then
lightly crawls like a ghost
and kisses my mother’s feet
inhaling below them the perfume of Paradise
and
dies . . there.