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Three Poems
Kim Kyung Ju
‘Underneath the leaves that stack my upper lip / the reindeer do not share their love.’ Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine.
Heavily Redacted
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’
I’ll Come Later Tomorrow
J.V. Foix
‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’
Black Rot and Mildew
Leontia Flynn
‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’
Two Poems
Tyehimba Jess
‘Let me tell you how / white hands kilned me / in the moonless middle / of night.’
Friday Afternoon with Boko Haram
Eliza Griswold
I spent the Hezbollah war in Nigeria eating hummus in a Syrian cafe and watching...
woman is a construct
Angélica Freitas
‘woman is basically meant / to be a residential complex / all the same / all plastered over / just in different colors’
Release the Darkness to New Lichen
Peter Gizzi
‘otherwise it is all otherwise I’m lost, did I say that’
Sanjay Nagar Blues
Anjum Hasan
‘motorcyclists like to howl / and dogs drop bulging bags of garbage / from their mouths when they see other dogs / they want to mount’
Terror
Kimiko Hahn
‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’
How to Get Over Someone You Love
Adam Fitzgerald
‘Would you like to come with me for some / old-fashioned inconclusive combat?’
Three Poems
Sakutarō Hagiwara
‘What I do not have is Everything: / how is it that I won’t bear this neediness?’
The Japanese Firefly Squid
Kimiko Hahn
‘nothing like an ancient corridor where a / woman is stripped of resistance.’
Two Poems
Kimiko Hahn
‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’
Station
Ishion Hutchinson
‘The train station was a cemetery. / Drunk with spirits, another being entered.’
Saturday Night
Lavinia Greenlaw
‘Do they dance for those creatures / whose unmade selves / come unbuttoning out of the dark?’
Accidental
Sadaf Halai
‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’
Fortunate It Is If Her Skirts Do Not Catch Fire
Amy Gerstler
‘I must remember god is not my private / secretary.’
Black Against the Sky, the Giant Mothers
Selima Hill
‘Black against the sky the giant mothers / are whispering together in the moonlight’
Yakisoba
Hiromi Itō
‘Who connects with the next woman / With tens and hundreds and thousands of women.’
Life and Time
Hasina Gul
We grow up but do not comprehend life. We think life is just the passing...
Remembered Summer
Troy Jollimore
‘Our conversations faltered, the celestial musicians / took a break between sets, and all the little engines / we had so painstakingly gathered and constructed / lapsed into stillness for a few brief moments.’
The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark
Seamus Heaney
‘I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence / That kept me standing listening while it grew.’
Two Poems
Jack Gilbert
‘Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. / The heart is a foreign country whose language none / of us is good at. ’
