Red Door #28 - The TYPEWRITTEN issue

POETRY
I dreamt I was watching
a disaster film
Un Sio San
Macao
Translated by Jeremy Tiang
I bought popcorn and picked my seat –
slightly left of center –
No one had brought a kid along.
Anyway, this wasn’t real.
Close up: a Mumbai track shoe factory,
a child worker.
He’s learned Math, the English alphabet,
this world and the third world,
the bleeding of his fingers a red pen correcting
his worth.
028
The woods
Hasso Krull
Estonia
Translated by Adam Cullen
It’s very still here today.
No saws rumble today, no harvester whines,
there’s no one here. Not even trees.
Can anyone spot an animal anywhere?
No. No animals tread here.
It’s long since any beasts have prowled this
place,
not even werewolves. Only
the forest.
In this forest, there’s not even wind.
This forest doesn’t rustle. No twigs snap,
no leaves fall, no splintered trunks squawk,
not a single bird sings anywhere.
This is an Estonian forest.
Listen to the sound of silence. Listen in
silence.
Listen to the way it softly whines, to the way
it whimpers,
to the way it wishes to say something but
can’t,
to the way it buzzes like a mosquito.
Listen to the booming of silence. The rustling
of silence.
It haunts you.
Haunting silence. Haunt, golden beast.
The frozen river, in its bottomless depths
completes its burial rites.
Wide shot: the scorching winds blow,
carrying
resounding farts from corn-fed cattle.
At this moment, someone called out:
This is blatantly an art house film!
This storyline is so dreary—
You’re killing me here.
The film drew to a close, a hundred
years had passed.
Production credits began their crawl.
We slowly departed.
Everyone seemed immensely satisfied
That their names appeared right at the
end.
Illustrations by
Richard Polt.