“Watchers,” from the portfolio Painting Past Photographs by Bradford Johnson, which appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of The Paris Review.

So this is hunger. A new war raging inside the war of missiles and bombs, a war no less brutal or mighty than the one searing us with its fires and sending us running to escape its crushing force. Hunger came for us in our home, as it did for others. We eat one meal a day now, halfway through the day; in the morning, a few biscuits are first shared between the children and then the adults, and in the evenings, we make do with tea.

Shortly after flour disappeared from the market in November 2023, it began to circulate again in the sacks originally intended for distribution by UNRWA. This sudden appearance was the result of an act of mass looting by crowds of hungry people, which we only heard about afterward: they had stormed the UNRWA warehouses, some breaking down the doors while others scaled the walls, and emptied them of their supplies—not only flour, but also tinned sardines, corn oil, milk powder, and dried lentils and chickpeas—in a matter of minutes. Apparently, they’d even taken wooden desks, shelves, and the agency’s archives—all of which could be used as firewood. I bought a sack of looted UNRWA flour for more than four times the usual price and made my way home as if bearing priceless treasure. My wife Ula and her sisters were jubilant, and we were all seized by a dark joy amid the wasteland of fear and grief that grows vaster and more desolate by the day as the war continues to escalate. We felt momentarily comfortable and safe; we could bake our own bread now, instead of waiting under the hot sun for hours in the uncertain hope of finding some at the bakery. But another problem stood in our path: to turn the thin rounds of dough into bread we needed an oven, and all we had in the apartment was a gas canister that barely sufficed to cook our regular meals. We would have to find some other way.

Mud ovens, which are what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted across the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—only my books. Read More

Ed Archie NoiseCat, Coyote Survives the Night. Courtesy of Julian Brave NoiseCat.

The night watchman who found my newborn father in the dumpster said his cries for life sounded like a cat. But that was pure, if darkly ironic, coincidence. Because our last name, NoiseCat, originally had nothing to do with noises or cats.

Instead, “Noiscat,” as it was once written, is a missionary’s bastardization of our ancestral name, Newísket. My family was colonized so hard we don’t remember what Newísket means. What I do know is that the name belonged to my great-grandmother Alice Noiscat from the village of Canoe Creek on the Fraser River. Listening to family and elders, I figure Alice was either a daughter, granddaughter, orphan, or slave of Copper Johnny Noiscat. Copper Johnny must’ve been both clever and industrious. During the Gold Rush and subsequent settlement of the colony and then province of British Columbia, he laid claim to a meadow that still bears his name. Today, Copper Johnny Meadow Indian Reserve No. 8 is part of the reserve lands of the remote Stswecem’c/Xget’tem (Canoe Creek/Dog Creek) First Nation. I’m not sure what Copper referred to. Maybe it referred to his red skin—a name stuck on him by semé7 (whites) who gave Indians names for amusement and convenience: “Oh yeah, this one’s ‘Indian Jim’ and that one’s ‘Copper Johnny.’ ” (In Secwepemctsín, the 7 denotes a glottal stop. The word kyé7e, “grandmother,” for example, is pronounced “kya-ah.”) Or maybe it referred to his wealth. In the Indigenous Northwest, copper is a prized trade good signifying that its owner has a wealth of food and culture to share. In a world where Indians had all our land taken from us, an Indian with land like Copper Johnny was rich. Copper Johnny Meadow may be the ancestral territory of the Newískets going back to some mythic progenitor whose deeds were marked and remembered on that land—through creation, transformation, and forces both natural and supernatural that make our world the way it is—all the way back to Coyote and whoever the first Newísket was. Or maybe, Copper Johnny is that first Newísket. He’s the oldest one we still remember today.

Based on conversations with my kyé7e, Alice’s daughter, the name Newísket could mean a couple of things—maybe “Long Day” or “Tall Timber Day.” But to see how that might be the case, it’s necessary to understand some of the history and peculiarities of Secwepemctsín and the Salish languages. Because like the meaning of my name, my ancestral tongues are fast slipping from the Land of the Living to that of the dead. Read More

FROM PRABUDDHA DASGUPTA’s portfolio Longing in THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW.

I don’t love being stoned, but I love being stoned in museums. Cannabis makes me quiet and uncertain, or chatty and self-conscious, which winds back to quiet and uncertain. Alone in a museum, however, the mind’s defenselessness—what divides me from all other objects is, it turns out, as sturdy as a sheet of wet tissue paper—no longer seems dangerous. I drift from room to room, pleased to dissolve into the art.

So, I took a low-dose edible upon arriving at the Museum of Modern Art on a September afternoon two years ago. I was there on assignment to write a poem about a piece in the permanent collection; I’d chosen a collotype by Eadweard Muybridge. As it wasn’t on display, I had an appointment in the photography department. A curator ushered me into a large room, all beige and white. In the center of the room stood a large table and a single chair, angled toward the window, which took up almost the entirety of one wall and looked out onto West Fifty-Third Street. The collotype, sleeved in plastic, lay waiting on the table. Woman Dancing (Fancy), one plate from Muybridge’s massive Animal Locomotion project, shows a woman in diaphanous white twirling across a black background.  For an hour I took notes sober, and then, after my thoughts went wispy, for an hour stoned. Across the street, grass sprang from low gray clouds. A roof garden. A pleasant vacancy resolved: done here. I would wander the galleries, I decided, until the edible wore off.

Down a flight of stairs, through an archway, I saw black rotary telephones arranged on plinths. The gallery wasn’t crowded; people moved through it like migrating animals, undistracted from loftier destinations. “Dial-A-Poem,” the wall text, blown up, sans serif, read. I lifted a receiver, thinking of my grandmother, who taught me to dial on her rotary phone. I’d loved the swing and catch, how you had to wait for each electrical pulse to send. It made a game of communication. In 1968, the artist and poet John Giorno created Dial-A-Poem, catchily and accurately named: call a telephone number and listen to a poem read by its author. Giorno got some of the best minds of his generation to contribute: John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka … the famous names roll on and on. This room reincarnated a MoMA exhibit, phones randomizing through two hundred poems, from decades earlier. Giorno died in 2019. Now, in my ear, he theatrically elongated an introduction: “Diiiiiaaaaal a Poooome‚” “poem” converted to defiant monosyllable, and “Baaaaarbaraaaa Guest.” Then a woman’s tailored voice took control. People used to apply more drama to enunciation: they both sounded like minor characters in All About Eve or The Philadelphia Story. “Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause. Read More

Photograph by Mariana Enriquez.

Carhué Cemetery
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2009

The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecuén Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn’t reach the town of Carhué, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecuén will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they’re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march.

I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it’s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake. Read More