Carl-Christian Elze
Translated by Caroline Wilcox Reul
pull the key from/
the switch just/
after ignition/
the key to your/
mind and travel on without/
Poetry
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São Luís, 1611
Talal Alyan
in us always the monorail circling a dark skyline,/an old synth/ rings in rings in rings aloud more/
siren than song in each and in us all the quiet/hours too/ letting the elevator lift us with strangers/ to apartments we will never share.
Bad Weather Over O’Hare
Talal Alyan
the miracle is there are/ none. sixty feet and rising/ over a Dakota that has/ gone to bed, she likes to tell/ herself the miracle is
The candle that I am, the vessel
Kathleen Hellen
in lesser light
in pews in back
I sit outside
When She Came Down from Sea to Earth…
Stella Díaz Varín
Translated by Rebecca Levi
Ah, winter inverts into noon!
Almost— as if from primal waters.
Onslaught of clover,
four leaves bent to the wind,
Brief History of My Life
Stella Díaz Varín
Translated by Rebecca Levi
I command soldiers.
And I’ve told them about the danger
of hiding weapons
in the bags under their eyes.
They don’t agree.
And since they spend all their time arguing,
the battle’s already lost.
An Act Could Perpetuate
Thomas Griffin
That this could perpetuate
anything matters least to
what follows
all out there
each act, moving
toward misery or perfection
Love me more than anything.
Jared Pearce
Just when it’s getting good, the rain
stops: barely slicking the road,
hardly cooling the concrete.
manuel, about something he had seen
Nadija Rebronja
Translated by Ivana Maksić
he was having his dinner.
three poached eggs and some salad.
she was having a shower.
he sank, completely.
she watched him sinking
paolo and marcos, on the terrace, on modern history
Nadija Rebronja
Translated by Ivana Maksić
they were walking
towards one another
across the long wall
two men
or perhaps two women
the wall was
from MOTHERSALT: A Lyric
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
X days
I’ve come unmoored from the hours. I crawl into pockets of time where there is none, lose a string of days without noticing. The weeks disappear like a dropped stitch.
life of i
Elizabeth Spires
i.
i left the capital hurrying away i carried nothing
a dark night before me a dark dark night
but when morning came i stood free & alone
casting a seven-league shadow west
I
Elizabeth Spires
You stand so straight and tall
and from afar you could be
a column, but up close I can’t tell
how tall you are. I run my hands
Specific Plants
Adam Clay
Nothing much to speak of: they grow
Away from each other, not like this action
Should be seen as less of an existence.
Order in everything,
Storm Watch
Adam Clay
A touch of madness mixed
With the news
& this moment feels like the new
Normal, the new slice
Great Aunt Mary Agnes’ Eye
Thomas March
Mary Agnes would watch
my uncle and my dad
while their parents were down
at the tavern, drinking.
Unburial
Thomas March
Because she never went
outside, and no one knew
whether she’d had her shots;
because the officers
Beyond Temples
Martina Reisz Newberry
Once, when I owned my years,
I walked with my friend up a dirt road
that ended at a falling-down house where
two children sat on a slivered porch step.
On Friendship
July Westhale
You left the door agape as a mouth, met me
in the middle of the road. Car red
as a throat, your hair on my tongue, your breasts
on my breasts—I hardly cry, but your body
Teresa of Avila: Patron Saint of Via Negativa
July Westhale
We all feel like magical realism.
As if we may ascend, like Remedios Moscote.
Maybe we haven’t fathers to show us something pedestrian,
like ice. Nor the trajectory of a firing squad. We at least
slim shadows
By Ulrike Almut Sandig
Translated by Jari Niesner
of the shimmer of the trees in the light I won’t
say anything, nor of the trees in themselves.
no word of the beech tree in the backyard of the doctor
whose daughter dies in the bedroom, no word
Maybe This is Why I Subject You to Danger
By Alex Rieser
At that area of the zoo where they keep the elephants
He’s spinning his little body
Around the base of three umbrellas
On the bench across
Exile Camp
By Diego Valeri
Translated by Laura Valeri
Beaten, uprooted trees are we
upright but smothered, and this miserly land
that carries us is not our land.
Around us, the rock blows enemy
Spider
By Geraldine Connolly
The one who swings the black star
of its body across the pane,
the one who keeps hanging its
Cinder
By Geraldine Connolly
Bitter ash your voice, like a cinder
your voice like a motor, revving
and roaring and whining, still.
When you were young and penniless,
The Unblazed Trail of Praise
By Bob Elmendorf
I’ve never seen the prairie. It must start
soon out of Buffalo, the farthest I’ve been west,
under whose streets Lake Erie, sharing shores
with Canada, flattens its sheet.
VII. In the Heeling
By Karla Reimert
Translated by Patty Nash
On the way home sucking on bribes.
Nothing in the city to buy
I could ever need.
I want to go to the playground later, dangle
IV. In the Clinic
By Karla Reimert
Translated by Patty Nash
I swallow tablets.
May all sensation bend tenderly
to my will.
The doctor talks loudly at me, his notes
gurgle and scrape. His speech is a giant organ.
III. In the Heeling
By Karla Reimert
Translated by Patty Nash
Peppermint bonbons striped
white-red in the doctor’s bribe jar.
Say “Ah.”
In the Room
By Iacyr Anderson Freitas
Translated by Desirée Jung
beyond these walls
the world exhausts
time is only
what is seen in the room