Tag: Poetry
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FOUR POEMS by Marie Lundquist, translated from the Swedish by Malena Mörling
What do we do with what we lack? A cleft palate weakness, a harmony,a sibling with whom to share ourselves. Quick and quarreling the rainfalls on memories no one is polishing. A few remain, hidden as if insecrecy. New names ring over the graves, mute and soft likemoss-mouths. …
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THREE POEMS by Bejan Matur, translated from the Turkish by Nell Wright
No spring The Judas-trees have bloomedwe’re mourning againno springno countryand blood everywhere. When kissing the earth They talked about a cavalry girlwalking. Tenacitycrossing valleys, mountains.Saying as she goes,how much I believedhow bound I was.Foremost when climbingmountains and valleys,kissing the earth with a breathno one knows.As if the mountains were beginning for the first…
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SYRINX by Alison Mandaville
After five years it’s a vague harassment, your name in a stranger’s mouth, my ear, a soft punch up from the gurney. Still— slight birds wake me with such repetitions: the branch point adjustment of throat valves, labia in tension, not warm, not cold-blooded. A liquid resonation, two resonations, a final exhalation of atmosphere.…
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90% DARK by Dina Folgia
The earth did not take me when I was nine, and I hated the earth for it. Each time I came to the place where the lake met the park and pressed my back into the soggy grooves at the boat launch, I flattened and flattened. When I couldn’t sink any lower into the…
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DAY 559 by Kim Jensen
If you hit the snooze you’ll have a little longer to live in the body of a wolf to gnaw at a bone in the woods parading the entrails back to the den you’ll have more time to be a nobody an unwanted wallflower wearing not even half a dress a few more minutes to…
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GHAZAL OF BORROWED GODS: A CENTO* by Laura A. Ring
Her funeral filled the road. O it is the old old myth. Gone by many names. Trust: I am no God. A chapel has fallen into ruins. I believe in the devil. Worse, that there are no gods. Outside, one statue keeps its head. The temple roof. Stand and remember its gods. My dead sisters…
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BONE ATLAS by Allison Zhang
Seventeen pounds— the gospel weight of a skeleton. Mine is lighter, I think. It whistles in the wind. The body, a country I was told not to settle— its borders or cities. I dreamed I was salt, crushed, dissolving in rain. The nurses said hydrate, singing it soft. But thirst is a clever animal—…
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SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE LAST LINGERING PETAL ON A CHERRY BLOSSOM by Anthony Thomas Lombardi
more than the millions of unsung buried in the potter’s field off pelham bay, more than the estuary where tides fold freshwater into saltwater & spit their bones into a knot of krill, mackerel, menhaden, pale glow like a stray moon wandered to the wrong side of the cosmos, slunk in a lost shark’s…
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TWO POEMS by Sebastian Paramo
Extinction Economy, or The Grapefruit Orchards of South Texas I didn’t listen. When you said it’d be bad. I learned the hard way. It was stupid. A garden once grew. Then there was a tree. It bore grapefruit. Someone said, eat it. Learn something you didn’t before. A snake oil salesman said it. He asks…
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TWO POEMS by Rajiv Mohabir
In Sixteen Bridal Adornments You Come, opening to another. What cannot be carried from room to room? You line eyes in burned ghee cured under the full moon, …
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TWO POEMS by Caitlyn Klum
Heaven What I call Sissy Spacek time of day. Like an ink stain looming behind the live oaks. I was draping laundry over the porch railing to dry and pretty much thinking a wild piece of laundry in the sky. What about you? It disappears so quick in this heat or folds over. Otherwise…
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OCTOBER INTERVIEW with EDWARD SALEM
Edward Salem is a poet who hasn’t lost his sense of humor. “Palestinians,” he shares in our interview, “are insanely funny.” It’s this sense of humor that jumps off the page of Salem’s debut poetry collection, Monk Fruit, surprising readers, even as he’s tackling topics like the occupation of Palestine, American imperialism, torture, and genocide.…