Kimiko Hahn

‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’

Seamus Heaney

‘I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence / That kept me standing listening while it grew.’

Issue 127

Kimiko Hahn

‘nothing like an ancient corridor where a / woman is stripped of resistance.’

Issue 100

Lavinia Greenlaw

‘did you breathe differently / as if equipped with an aqualung’

Benoit Jutras

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.

Sakutarō Hagiwara

‘What I do not have is Everything: / how is it that I won’t bear this neediness?’

Renee Gladman

‘Things were starting to line up: history was speaking, which hardly ever happened to me.’

Minal Hajratwala

‘The unicorns are a technology / we cannot yet approximate.’

Kimiko Hahn

‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’

Jack Gilbert

‘Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. / The heart is a foreign country whose language none / of us is good at. ’

Tyehimba Jess

‘Let me tell you how / white hands kilned me / in the moonless middle / of night.’

Miriam Bird Greenberg

‘Why wasn’t I better made / to refute assimilation’s maze’

Issue 2

Richard Godden

‘She is, sharp as / an aftertaste of iron; and yet, at times, / dull.’