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Poetry

21

To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki

Translated by Mira Rosenthal

that color once existed here. And dust gets in./ The nests of ants and mice now totally exposed./ A moving out, an exodus. This once was home./ Once light and heat and fire. Now so much wind.

Two Poems by Pierre Haroche

By Pierre Haroche

When the world was young / Places did not exist / Earth heaven ocean / Stood side by side / In every direction / Humans lived all together…

Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Tatsuhiko Ishii

Translated by Hiroaki Sato

The green of the cypresses being so dark. . . . The island of death, is, that, the island of poets? / The noble (poet’s) fury. Just when the evening glow enwraps the world in darkness

Tribar by Andra Rotaru

Translated by Anca Roncea

on the first day we were met by a dying child. basking in the sun, sitting
on a manhole cover. around, there were three other children: one with
a torn eye, one with dermatitis and an ear torn off and another very
pale, soaked in blood.

Five Poems by Salvador Espriu

Translated by Sonia Alland and Richard Jeffrey Newman

To save me from the sea, / perhaps a verse, / perhaps some clear words, / are all I have. / Their value / is my entire life.

 

 

Two Poems by Teemu Helle

Translated by Niina Pollari

That spring you met with national mourning, and your capital turned gray. / You looked at your spouse in the coffin and understood

Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Behold a uniform man / behold a desert soul / an impassive mirror for the world / Sometimes I wake and join forces and possess / The rare good that grows

Ten Poems by Marie Lundquist

Translated by Kristina Andersson Bicher

I searched for a climbing tree / to fall out of. You were stepping / right into grief. Your errand  / was to be overgrown. Become grief. / Cold grief. I fell. Soft / as an apple.

 

Five Poems by Maia Evrona

By Maia Evrona

Daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes: / Daughter of the world sustained / on the sweat of a back in pain; / mother of a word with wings on its feet.

Six Poems by Ágnes Gergely

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

The crooked street darkens / the city’s diseased lungs. / Drags to its entrance gates / the one unafraid of the heavens.

The Wedding Party by Jonida Prifti

Translated by Diana Thow

The only illusion is that there’s a road to follow to an end: the hallway inhabits a closed door hourly. The mystery of a dark legend buried inside a tunnel where children grow into adult visions.

Two Poems by Monika Herceg

Translated by Mirza Purić

Under a stolen car the world will shrink down to a single truth, and then I’ll encourage / the bullet I’d spat out into your lung.

Five Poems by Marko Tomaš

Translated by Rachael Daum

Someday it will be enough. / I’ll write a poem, / the words will spill all over your street / and you’ll slip / and fall straight into my arms my shackles / they’re learning to be gentle / by way of drunkenness,

Four Poems by Sylvia Beato-Davis

By Sylvia Beato-Davis

sleep without touching & in the morning, you ask what is the matter., but nothing is ever the matter until the tea kettle struggles to sing. i dig to remember the ardor of dreamlife, putting the wrapped stick of butter near the flame to melt.

Middlemost Constantine

By Ken White

I forget nothing / think of a curse / triple it and still / you’re nowhere near / all braids evenly divided / from earth

Imaginary Explosions

By Caitlin Berrigan

Even an entirety must have an edge. Just as the continents drifted before, leaving a line against water: California.

Three Poems from The Exeter Book

Translated by Gnaomi Siemens

All over the earth are countless creatures we can never know. / Wherever water encircles the world’s bright breast, legions /
of land-roving beasts, huge swarms of birds, crowd against / the roaring surf, the surge of the salty waves.

The Shutters by Ahmed Bouanani

Translated by Emma Ramadan

In an angel’s bed in a wool dress she sleeps / The house is cold the walls white like a dream / motionless death takes a seat / and for two weeks awaits the end of the temporary peace

She Is Angry by Maja Lee Langvad

Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

She is angry about being an export. She is angry that adoption agencies in sending as well as receiving countries make money off transnational adoption.

Red by Helena Österlund

Translated by Paul Cunningham

The wolf is so small / The wolf is so very small / I see the wolf die / I don’t know what to do / I see that the wolf is on the ground / I see the wolf die / I stand beside the wolf

The Easiness and the Loneliness by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

Translated by Susanna Nied

my fathers mother kept smoking after her stroke / one side of her face was paralyzed / she could just barely hold her lips together, they werent airtight / it must have affected the strength of her smokes / i think now

Four Poems by Elías Knörr

Translated by Meg Matich

I invited the biologist into my back garden / he marveled at the lightbulbs / and took to dancing like a night moth

“Ode to Sadness” by Ghayath Almadhoun

Translated by Catherine Cobham

We love you, Europe. We love your art and hate your colonialist history, love your theatre and hate your concentration camps, love your music and hate the sound of your bombs

Three Poems by Friða Ísberg

Translated by Meg Matich

wet paper / tangled in birch branches / inside the window, smoking, / a woman with red hair / says to herself: / they can’t hear me anymore

Wingbeats by Shadi Angelina Bazeghi

Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Rain clouds and fox traces / newly-fledged birds / a pair of rotten cherries hitting the ground / an inevitable detachment, a dry release

Nine Poems by Tanella Boni

Translated by Todd Fredson

I dream the poem of a borderless sea / I dance a welcoming music in my skin / first ground for any home / while the hands of plenty the portly souls / weave their barbed wire

Four poems by Léopold Sedar Senghor

Translated by Baba Badji

Here is the Sun/ Which tightens the breasts of the virgins/ Who makes the old men smile on the green benches/ Who would awaken the dead under a maternal earth.

A Prose-Poem Series by Vincent Broqua

Translated by Cole Swensen

They have the extreme, soft, palpable, tangible sensation of glimmering each with his neck plunged in a basin of water, made artificial, they look at each other, clearly apt to scurry off, they know nothing of each other, to scrutinize, they possess the fragile, fluttering, heightened, exclamatory sensation of being able to leave at any moment, whenever they want

Four Poems by Antonio Machado

Translated by Daniel Evans Pritchard 

It was a time of infamy and lies. / The nation itself was dressed up / like a squalid clown to draw / attention away from our wound.

Two Poems by Elitza Kotzeva

By Elitza Kotzeva

Memories of moments from my childhood days / carefully sealed in the sarcophagus of / forlorn history / forgotten history / forbidden history

Four Poems

By Chris Blackman

Hope is but a greeting card, it occurs to me,
while in a cab barreling across the Triborough Bridge
and it might be important enough to get this maxim
tattooed on my neck in case I forget this simple truth
and lest ideas otherwise become more obtrusive,
more incessant, but these are just the ugly thoughts
to which I am chemically prone, when I’m feeling morbid—

Five Poems

By Michael Juliani

As the fishermen strangle cod
out on the wet docks our refrigerator arrives
and today is a warm sleeved gust
passing through the afternoon
a somnolent incident of pleasure

Three Poems by Zhu Zhu

Translated by Dong Li 

days are placid, like an olive grove
spread upon the slopes, not
too many high rises, not too much dust
or too many nouveau-riche neighbors;

Four Poems by Anita Pajević

Translated by Mirza Purić

for breakfast I’ve had
a small coniferous forest
and in it a squirrel
I pressed him on a serviette
stored him between two leaves of newspaper

Three Poems by Mária Ferenčuhová

Translated by James Sutherland-Smith

Crystals grown too quickly to champ with teeth
scratch throat. with narrow fingers across
canvas voiceless retrace twists and turns.

Six Poems by Daniela Danz

Translated by Monika Cassel

The linden tree has lost all its leaves
and nothing is left of the summer but
the wish to stroke old Germany’s
head one more time

Two poems by Julia Fiedorczuk

Translated by Bill Johnston

I’d like to say—to her, to both of them—
let’s lie down beneath the grass, lie in the shade
of dried-out ships, let matters of fate be left
to those plane trees, I’d like to say, look over there!

Two Poems by Miodrag Stanisavljević

Translated by Mirza Purić

My beautiful triune people, you’re fairest
in the morning when you gush forth
from your colon-colonies
and your public transport vans
– thank you.

Three Poems by Anja Marković

Translated by Mirza Purić

You’re always on the edge between two chasms, cradle-ladles,
as your limping legs laze on the wall.
There are wider spaces in you, their evening chill
callously presses your palms
as if to pierce your insides, spill into the night,
into the rivers above the roofs, into the rotten orchards of the sky.

Three Poems by Wioletta Greg

Translated by Eliza Marciniak

Cold surfaces of mirrors stubbornly hold their form.
Beyond the looking-glass, atoms have combined
into impenetrable worlds.
I found warm newborns in the rabbit-hole.

Two Poems by Selma Asotić

Translated by Mirza Purić

When we wet the bed
for three nights in a row
they put a shroud
over our heads
and brought the lead
to our eyes

Two Poems by Lidija Deduš

Translated by Mirza Purić

I’ve got all the necessary qualifications to become stateless I’ve got
an expired passport of a state which no longer exists and a birth certificate
from a city in a country no one will recognise

Two Poems by Darko Cvijetić

Translated by Mirza Purić

Says
All things
When you lay them
One across the other
Make a cross
Only a man
Dropped as a perpendicular
Onto another man

The Night So Long by Marjorie Agosín

By Marjorie Agosín

Suddenly,
That night became longer still.
Around us the silence turned dark as well,
An opaque hue of gray without blue.
Bewildered girls asked what had happened.
All their mothers knew to do was play with their disheveled hair.

Three poems by Maximilian Voloshin

Translated by Masha Udensiva-Brenner

I want to scream something
Into its dark, open jaws,
To bring my ear to it,
Press up against it with my tremulous heart.

Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

At the time I had no answering machine, so
I couldn’t call myself. Ludicrous, perhaps,
even morbid, how secure it made me feel to know
at any time I could hear my own voice. There is a voice, however
mechanical, which is mine.

Pianist’s Fingers by Berta García Faet

Translated by Kelsi Vanada

love’s cry lingers incomplete like a half-articulated sneeze love is a half-sneeze cut off by another sneeze creaking a reflex scandalously i rest my skull on your sweet skull a phonograph before the sonata in C major accentuates and duplicates the cravings and increases wellbeing and exists