Open letter to the boy with the red umbrella


I have never kissed a boy in the rain. These are the smallest
things. I wake up in another country and my hands are cold
and I will never understand how to live like this. Something
about my white shirt, soaked through. The way you turned
around and pretended to know my name. Do you want this?
I'm almost home
. Questions with no answers. The right way
to accept an offering. Red umbrella in the rain. I understand
how to fend off ghosts. I understand how to read the Bible
without letting it mean anything. You followed me through
a city and I didn't know what that meant. We must always
be careful. White shirt in the rain. People watching people:
a sort of performance. I'll admit that I was scared. I'll admit
to most things, as long as they'll make me seem more human.
Admit that most of us have no idea what we're doing. It feels
too honest to be wrong. Analogy: I am a wolf and I founded
an empire. I am a fox and I skinned a rabbit. You will never
know, but I am so thankful. There are things that I will never
be able to repay. Things you will never know. The umbrella
hangs in my closet and someday I will give it to some stranger
in the street. Signs of life. A thick blue rain. We are all so safe.




Talin Tahajian grew up near Boston. Her poetry has recently appeared in Salt Hill JournalIndiana ReviewKenyon Review OnlineBest New Poets 2014Columbia Poetry ReviewDIAGRAM, and Washington Square Review. She's the author of half a split chapbook, START WITH DEAD THINGS (Midnight City Books, 2015), and serves as a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal. She is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, where she studies English literature and attempts to assimilate.








The body of the theatre cannot live
on it's own blood.
Its haemophilia requires to be nourished
by blood from other bodies.

Eugenio Barba,
"Letters From the South of Italy"
in "Solitude. Craft. Revolt."
1999, Black Mountain Press, p. 123














Today I'll explain that a light particle has zero mass. Light as its name implies, travels at the speed of light. But if you apply Einstiens' equation which I told you before, anything travelling at the speed of light has infinite mass. But a tiny particle of light couldn't have infinite mass, could it? The only solution is for it to have zero mass.

A particle of light must have zero mass. There is no other solution.

Do you notice anything else strange about this? Can you sat that something of zero mass even exist? What is this particle which is like a dot of nothing? And remember, that light is also a wave. As it's a wave it has a wavelength, which is like the waves width. But if you keep reducing it's wavelength, is there a point where it becomes zero? If it's zero, that's not a wave, is it? However tiny it is a wave has a wavelength. So, the smallest wavelength of a wave of light also has a quantity of zero.

Do you understand? Yes, it's complicated.

The thing is, in the world of the very small zero does have a width. In other words, zero isn't zero. The whole universe is filled with an infinite number of zeroes.

Zero is the basis of everything.

So nothingness isn't the same as meaninglessness.

Nothingness is the basis of everything.


Mountains and rivers, the earth and human beings. Everything is composed of combinations of this nothingness. This would seem to be a true representation of the world.


From 'Journey to the Shore' (2015)

directed + screenplay by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
based on a book by Kazumi Yumoto