I. Slavonic Dances Your bare feet slap against the floor. I am afraid my rooms are too small for such leaping and whirling when you fill my white spaces with suddenly bright colors and I know that not even for you can I wear again in my hair red ribbons. We are on opposite shores […]
Poetry
from PAN TADEUSZ, BOOK 11: THE YEAR 1812 by Adam Mickiewicz (translated by Leonard Kress)
When the cattle were driven to pasture that spring, although they were famished and lean, they reluctantly went and would not venture near the spring corn that was already green, sprouting up from the frozen ground. Instead, they fell to the ground where the earth was plowed, where each cow in turn lowered its head, […]
TRENY #7 (ON THE DEATH OF HIS DAUGHTER, URSZULA) by Jan Kochanowski (translated by Leonard Kress)
Hangars draped with clothes you’ll never wear; they miss the warm touch of your body. Moths will soon begin to feed upon that cloth; what rhetoric will persuade me now to clear your closet out? The iron sleeps beside the starch, ribbons remain wrinkled and knotted under the golden clasp…Flowers on your dress, potted in […]
TRENY #1 (ON THE DEATH OF HIS DAUGHTER, URSZULA) by Jan Kochanowski (translated by Leonard Kress)
Let all the cries of Heraclitus, and all Simonides’ dreary complaints and laments, along with other ancient malcontents, stoop-shouldered and sighing—let their tears fall as they cross my threshold for this wake to help me mourn my daughter, to seal her casket. Help me, a father like a mother nightingale— her nest discovered by a […]
THE MOUNTAINTOP SENDS A POSTCARD FROM THE BREAKS INTERSTATE PARK by Ida Stewart
From here I see three states at once: Virginia underfoot, Kentucky and West Virginia making up the vista, all three joining hands at the Tug. I wish you were here. The train is passing. It passes for a long time, wending uphill, around the bend and tunneling. They live for the chug, here, […]
POINT BLANK by Ida Stewart
“You can have my right arm, but you’ll never get my mountain.” —Larry Gibson, on his stand against mountaintop removal coal mining This is a point: a green island in a sea of scar, a rise not unlike his potbelly under the neon green t-shirt— and what with the hilltop cemetery like a belly […]
AGAINST THE NOTION RAIN FALLS UP by Elizabeth Switaj
for Diana Manister the dead are peaceful equals rain falls up Axiom of Bibles not named book minus obtuse angel a transitive property of geometric faiths dead vanish into torments dreamed to peel real fantom flesh w/o chance of Heaven perfection lost w/o-ne set o’ praisesong wings equals water without sin dead vanish into […]
BECOMING OCEANIC by Elizabeth Switaj
without burning when everything is heat & sex and can & can’t and Yes & yes cool breath that draws beads of cicada-drenched humidity from where they suffocate your neck can’t be transmitted by nerves called love without getting caught in reflex loops of fuck & fuck eventually we wake to no whether in illness […]
CRASH & COURSE by Elizabeth Switaj
eventually we found the plane settled in a sea of glass shards between bright-blood fish who settled on our skin to suck whatever remained unfocused on retrieval & so converted instinct into genius of desire you took so many feet with you to wander, blend your slender bones (less skin) into starved processions too tired […]
FESTERING SONG by Elizabeth Switaj
fire tries the rotten planks soft-surround like my rotten toes & fungal nails brittle bones osteoporotic names for my hands & what they say could peel away the bark & heart where my potato bugs & larvae scramble, lay their secrets to impure oxygen & light in lichen lattice they stand for something , move […]
