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Advice Column

Kazim Ali

‘Me always untorn and enslaved / Weird notions of gender and ground / Nothing but you between me and god.’

Toboggan Run

Fiona Benson

‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’

Demeter

Fiona Benson

‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’

Picnic

Emily Berry

‘Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole / Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person / I tried to do that.’

Krapp Hour

Anne Carson

‘Funny to end up here you may think, in this line of work, did I back into it, well more or less.’

The More We Think About It

Michael Earl Craig

‘Yeah, something has slapped us. / We have definitely seen something.’

Apparition

Mark Doty

‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’

How to Get Over Someone You Love

Adam Fitzgerald

‘Would you like to come with me for some / old-fashioned inconclusive combat?’

Cooley High: 1991

Aracelis Girmay

‘Please stay with me as I / replay the last touch.’

Three Poems

Sakutarō Hagiwara

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

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.’

The Japanese Firefly Squid

Kimiko Hahn

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

Terror

Kimiko Hahn

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

The Common Cold

Laura Kasischke

‘But here we are again, you and I, the / two of us, tangled / up and biological.’