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
Poetry
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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
Hinges slipping and about to give
By Marina Massenz
Translated by Johanna Bishop
I unwind my threads, unravel with
feigned patience inner skeins
in the drenched time, the heat transfixes
transforms the solid body
We came out of the box only this morning
By Marina Massenz
Translated by Johanna Bishop
We came out of the box only
this morning joints and reflexes clack
clack all rusty getting into gear
slowly but surely in full operation
Zunzuncito
By Luisa A. Igloria
It’s so quiet at night.
In these rooms, each one
prays in her own compartment
In the Garden of Earthly Delights,
By Luisa A. Igloria
which Abomination are you?
The quiz bait: Are you an ass lobster,
or a guy who’s just trying to jerk off
And So Do the Trees
Carol Hamilton
The young artist grabbed up
industrial castoffs, plastic-backed
chairs, built edifices
to tower or confine, but soon
How To Tell You What Restraint Means
Kelli Allen
Mirabi says elephants know the way
down each mountain. Valleys pass
in supplication under such feet.
Stilettos Can Wait by the Door
Kelli Allen
This will be a love letter after slipping
into, zipping fast, the tent. Calibrate how
gravity draws one feather over a bone.
Molecules
Martin Willitts Jr.
Light is not lush, or mute,
not even a combination of ghosts
rising from carpet
as a funnel of dust motes,
Separation and Pulling Together and Separating
Martin Willitts Jr.
the body remembers what the mind forgets
withdraws from the world by inches
escalating exponentially
“but all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty…” (from Sappho’s Fragment 31, translated by Anne Carson)
S.D. Lishan
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
wears a garland of longing.
I have painted my eyes and claws in scarlet.
My horse’s nostrils flare.
If You Forget Me (Response to Pablo Neruda’s Poem)
Diana Raab
I want you to know
one thing
if there is ever a day
when you begin to think
where I am in this world
and if I could live without you
IV. A “Counter-Wish” Dream (151)
Peter J. Grieco
It was the cleverest of all my dreamers
who provides the next example. She had
rebelled, violently, against the idea
of having to spend the summer
II. Mephistopheles’ Complaint (78)
Peter J. Grieco
Dreaming has been compared with the random
cacophony resulting from “the ten
fingers of a man who knows nothing about
music, as they wander over the keys
While waiting for the hardscaper’s estimate
Sean Mahoney
Am foreign.
Am false equivalence.
Radiographic spread. Orgiastic
systems: thin white matter
The Avenue
Alfredo Barnaby
At dusk the skirt would unfold from an inkblot.
I would follow each hem,
vase of barren soil tilting forth,
palms welled for a spare garden,
Still
Craig Evenson
Without the thrashing snake
it is till:
a cross, i,
a pair of trainless rails
a vacant trail
Umwelt
Sophie Strand
def. the world as experienced by a particular organism.
All I want is a red dress. I can circumscribe the island
in a day’s walk. My forays into other worlds always involve me
Chinese Dream 24
Timothy Yu
Dr. Timothy lectured till
his tenure came and then
he stole a voice & lectured to the world.
They publish again & again, like war,
Chinese Dream 22
Timothy Yu
I am not the man who spoke & spoke.
I am not the girl better, braver but.
I am not thinged for your school.
I am not wise. I keep my selving shut.
Meanwhile
Sandra Kolankiewicz
Instead, we bought things even though we knew
purchasing would improve nothing, would make
the days worse as the bills came in, too fraught