Category: Issue 29

In this millenniumyou are like a bird that flew into a window,a forgotten landscape,a watch stopped on a wrist,yellowing wallpaper.  Like the only guestat every hotel.If you hate yourself in this town,you are not alone. Summer is fullof signs without singularity.A little spidercrawls on the wallpaper,turns around, and hides.From distantmountain cliffs,bedstraw hawk-moths.Incorrectlycatalogued epochs. What good…

Anatomy   Bodytribe made of organsloads of lifework-toolsthe cutters are the philosophers of the somathey only worship the oneAnadyomeneappearing Aphroditeunanswered love, they look her in the mouthmy woe is my jewellerymy promisethe anatomists stroke herarms and handsthigh and footthey feel and taplook her between fingersand toes and count anomaliesmalformed soundsancestry is checkedand accent, the symmetryof…

At night, this year’s snow melts into a spring, knocks at the wooden door. Pi li pa la, a sound more wearing than the clamor of cattle and horses during the day. I dream that the tattered wooden doorturns out to be myself, knocked round and round by transparent snow, by the crescent moon.   Winnie Zeng writes…

1. The Disappearing Disappeared Language that You Must Find Again (and at once the apparently familiar is perceived as the unrecognized, allowing for this sudden removal of things to glide past you) 2. And “Now” Will No Longer Signal the 1990s (if one has the opportunity to closely examine the ceasefire at the point where…

               Originally published in the bilingual collection Book of Gratitude (Aktual Arvest, 2012). I am not a name,I busied myself building other things,which I found necessary,and highways rose inside me,narrow footpaths bridged a thousand roads,and I built cozy houses for those,who know the true order of things,thosewho know shame,those…

Hand rapping the dashboard Morse-code style, you approach the intersection of yet another dust-caked town where the red lights seem to always flash. The cigarette wedged between your index and middle finger ashes across your shirt sleeve, your pale thumb bending so far back it looks like a U-turn. Against the black fingerless glove, the…

  After the TV, tablet, no-namebags, and Gigi’s sapphire ring, I thought I was cunningpushing cash halfway through the paper feedof a broken printer.It was the last place he would look, but hefound the money and ran offwith the printer too.He said he was born to find it, an octopuswho can find its wayout of a jar with the…

  Do I want to be a poet who tells you exactly why they’re sad? Should I be someone who mixes in the cream-at-the-top of the yogurtor someone who eats it straight off the surface?  I wash plastic produce bags and hang their dripping membranes on a line to dry.I have been disgusted by intimacy and…

  Elegy with a Treble Hook Ten years, twenty years later, I am stillthat child beneath my father’s belt raised high in the air above his head.Still waking up each morning to him ripping my shirt off my back, grabbingthe weight of me from sleep. How long will it take for my anger to fade?…

This early morning, clouds pulled underus full of breath, in sheets,completely inhuman, and it was early, as I said, so the light deepened the relief of the drifts in the unrolled bolt,which settled like his curls, or dunes, or hummocksof substantial ground, and though moved, I thought continually of something else, several proofs of which…

What to do with this obsession, sit her on the front step with us as we blow smoke into August’s heat? Loss makes a dent in the air. And I’m supposed to bear it? I can’t bear it. Taste of promise. Taste of ash and dirt. The sound a plant makes as it dies from…