Bubble Butt deep down the crack is a new shopping mall, so happening. rows of old cemeteries successfully exhumed. AIDS gentrification becomes Undetectable. lots for ladies parking 24/7. eco-label shelves. sustainability tags. PrEP pills ready for delivery imported from Bangkok. thank you for not using plastic bags. 0% installments. Automatic doors. sparkling like bubble butts. […]
Featured Translation
Three Poems by Hendri Yulius Wijaya,
CITY HONEY [STADTHONIG]
by Björn Bicker, Translated by Neil Blackadder
NOTE: Hanau, a city near Frankfurt, was the site of a terrorist shooting in 2020; the gunman targeted people with an immigrant background. Two earlier far-right terrorist attacks took place during Oktoberfest in Munich in 1980, and in 2016 at the Olympia shopping mall, also in Munich. When you’ve got reality Who needs to […]
You Can Never Drive to Taipei City 開車進不了臺北城
by Hsieh Chih-wei
translated from the Chinese by Tony Hao
What is the hardest place to drive to? “It’s not the edges of the world,” said Father, “It’s the place you commute to every day. You can never drive to Taipei City.” Father used to be a construction worker. A construction worker never took weekends off. A day without rain was a workday, and […]
A sweet memory of summer and Poem for the body politic
by Kacper Bartczak
Translated from the Polish by Mark Tardi
the bright panels of the horizon box are within reach
in full light the organism enters a state of self-emission
*The Trip to the East of France, An Excerpt*
by Christine Angot
Translated from the French by Armine Kotin Mortimer
I met my father in a Strasbourg hotel, I wouldn’t know how to identify it now. The building had about five floors. In front there were a few parking spots. You went in through a glass door. The registration was on the left. In the back there was an elevator. Wooden stairs with a carpet […]
Three Poems
by Abboud al Jabiri
Translated from the Arabic by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp
All tears have homes.
I’ve never read about a homeless tear
nor have I met any of them rolling around in the streets
or seen a flood that resulted
from an outpouring of weeping.
Solitude
by 蕭熠Jackie Hsaio
Translated from the Chinese by Lauren Harper
In her present life, she had about five friends. Since she frequented nowhere, she wouldn’t necessarily have met them. They were all from past lives, and she wasn’t sure why they’d remained. Like limescale build-up in the bend of a pipe, thickening with time and the water flow. Impossible to ignore after a while. One […]
Three Poems by Alfonsina Storni,
translated from the Spanish by Norman Weinstein and Celia Gil Llamas
Zoological garden of clouds I’ve got to sing to the cloud overhead: Here’s to you, tender teddy bear, your lover kisses another cottony cloud, and when you bite it, the cloud disperses. And there’s the snake that chased me in my dreams, this one: and then there’s a pink heron coming from the river, and […]
Honest Isak
by Jasna Dimitrijević
Translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox
Honest Isak The door was opened by a tiny woman with curly hair tied up in a bun, which was pinned on the top of her head like a giant chestnut. She couldn’t have been any taller than 5’3”, but my eyes still came in a good two and a half inches under the tips […]
Love, Mother
by Miklós Vámos
translated from the Hungarian by Ági Bori
Károly! I haven’t seen you in a week! My mother is in the hospital, Isti is failing his classes, the neighbors saw Mari kissing a boy in the building’s doorway, and you don’t give a shit about anything!
