On that lawn each morning a little girl’s sandal rests in the grass. Today the flip-flop for weeks became a pink gellie, the color of my skin disease, but lighter. The white truck gassing mosquitoes just whined by in the dark, convincing no one. I wonder, as if to say goodbye, if the driver has […]
Poetry
Acropolis by Rimas Uzgiris
For Francesca The columns curve slightly inward, like the fabric of your skirt when you walk, and there are no other sights like this one, only intimations of the one we love. All things seep white light and breathe through lazy, Attic afternoons. Stones are loaned life by a searing breeze blowing down from barren […]
Letter to Chaplin (The Kid) by Jon Thompson
Remembering you, I’m remembering us—or your imagined, hoped-for version of us. I’m remembering the Tramp who could not help but find himself in the shabbiness of run-down Olvera Street. Shambling, or as the occasion demanded, running in his trademark herky-jerky way from the law. Who struggled against hard-heartedness & casual cruelty, holding fast onto the […]
Three Themes from Edward Hopper by Feliks Netz (translated by John Guzlowski and Janusz Zalewski)
1. Morning in the City a naked woman in a room naked as her skin turns away in shame from the eye of God and reaches in hopeless self-defense for a towel to cover her breasts and sex she combed her red hair back with her left ear exposed finished her morning toilet but not as […]
Identity by Amado Nervo (translated by Ethan Madarieta)
Tat tuam asi (You are this: that is, you are one and the same as all that surrounds you; you are the thing in itself) He who knows he is one with God achieves Nirvana: a Nirvana in which all darkness is illuminated; dizzying expansion of human consciousness, which is only a projection of the […]
Brother/Sister by Kyle Muntz
///1/// The Father was cutting wood in the yard. He’d been crying for hours. A few times, the Sister came out, and stood with her head tilted to the side. She said, It’s alright, life really isn’t so bad, when you think about it, and Don’t worry, the winds are coming, the clouds are going away, but he didn’t say anything […]
The Shape of Things by George Moore
Look at this painting squared by light of a certain afternoon hour, hung on the wall out of reach of the dead, who were to blame. See the red roofs and the boxes, spared by his new infinity? Cezanne lost his sight to oceans, repetition, the impossible wave. The ocean was an idea mounting the […]
Bloodrain by Agnar Artúvertin (translated by Matthew Landrum)
Run through the blood rain on the streets. Run fast before the police arrive. Look for an instant – between the houses the moon is sailing slowly, almost smilingly. I wonder how it would feel to be alone at such great a height, alone but surrounded with many stars: heaven’s rain or ember, traveling light […]
Variation 6: Snake by Alice B. Fogel
Have use of edges. Alongside field—crosshatch trees to their meadow pedestal. Way is seam here beneath eaves where when further forest rises and effaces sun camouflaging silver bleed congeals. Smaller than rivers go sleek like rivers and like rivers slip unseen below earthly surface things— pour with invisible volition between storm-tamped weeds—slip clear through stone […]
Wandering Bouts by Katy E. Ellis
Yes, we find the shrine— dot of island, nothing more. Dust, relic, and hope. … Twin hive houses stand history brailed in landscape. Relatives unknown. … Mud against bee’s sting, lip already bulb red taut, gravel roads wring on. … When a door opens hundreds of people climb stairs— not the Northern Lights. … Legs […]
