Poetry

  • July 2018

    A painting of a woman's face, composed of mostly angular lines
       By Hero Kurda
    Ismail Khayat, A Girl, 2015, Sulaimani, 40 x 27, acrylic paint and colored pencils on paper You in Me On the shore of the warm seaI standMy heels kiss your shoresI lift my dress to my knees...

  • July 2018

    A painting of a woman's face, composed in angular lines
       By Sherko Bekas
      Photo: Ismail Khayat, A Girl, 2015, Sulaimani, 40 x 27, acrylic paint and colored pencils on paper. Answer After Halabja* suffocated,I wrote a long complaint to GodBefore...

  • July 2018

    A pencil drawing of two distorted faces juxtaposed beneath what appears to the edge of a wave with another figure that could be a rock or a bird in the upper right hand corner. The whole image is a circle.
       By Abdulla Pashew
    Ismail Khayat, Sleeping, 2013, Sulaimani, 33 x 33, pencil on paper. Soccer I see Kurdistan as a soccer field, independence as a ball, plump with air. From the beginning of our existence, run...

  • July 2018

    A photograph of Yu Xiuhua writing on a laptop
       By Yu Xiuhua
    Still from Still Tomorrow (2016), dir. Jian Fan, produced by Youku Tudou, Inc. Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You To sleep with you or to be slept, what’s the difference if there’s any...

  • July 2018

    A black and white photo of train tracks stretching into a high-contrast distance
       By Zoltán Böszörményi
    Photo: Public Domain Pictures/Pixabay Empty Trains The mornings departand arrive without you.Empty trains.Your spirit flashes now and thenon the hem of a sky foundering in light.Sentences fog the ste...

  • July 2018

    A photograph of a landscape, with a dilapidated looking pond in the foreground and acres of ground stretching out behind it with a cemetery in the distant background
       By Chantal Bizzini
    The cemetery as seen en route to Landes, Canappeville, Eure, France. Photo by Chantal Bizzini   Author’s note: With this somewhat old-fashioned title, I actually intended to talk about the...

  • May 2018

    An intricate mandala traced in thin henna red lines
       By Claribel Alegría
    for Bud ¡Sí, es azul, tiene que ser azul! – José Gorostiza I can’t free myself from my boredomalways completing circlesswallowing myselflike the serpentswallows its tail.I’...

  • May 2018

    A close-up photo of a white pillow lying on a bed. The blue curtains can be seen, blurred, in the background with a hint of light from the outside streaming in.
       By Lamia Makaddem
    photo: Jason Trbovich/flickr Poetry was created to solve family problems Let me just say:this is why poetry was createdto solve family problems when neededand sometimes to wash the dishes and polish...

  • May 2018

    A panoramic shot of Piburger Lake in Austria
       By Mohamed Metwalli
    Piburger Lake, Austria. Paul Gilmore/Unsplash To an ordinary manWho couldn’t care lessAbout disasters befalling him,To some modest happinessThat this man finds in a bar in wintertimeWithout a fight,T...

  • May 2018

    Three youths photographed from above, their shadows producing three upright figures trailing behind them
       By Juan Bello Sánchez
    photo: palon youth/unsplash We Learned to Pronounce Brooklyn in the Movies we learned to pronounce brooklyn in the moviesto undress in the backseats of carsto await chance with a roll of the dice we...

  • May 2018

    Juxtaposed photos of sand dunes through different color filters
       By Mahtem Shiferraw
    Photo: Meriç Dağlı/Unsplash Nomenclatures II Those which we are givenin the brink of sorrow,or joy – or both; those marked on our foreheadsthe curse of a generation,or more, marked on our abdomensbi...

  • March 2018

    A pen drawing of a man smoking a cigarette outside of a house
       By Jake Ricafrente
    Winter 97, by Maia Cruz Palileo Most nights, he takes his coffee black, rewindsAnd plays the slasher films he’s seen a dozenTimes, smokes packs of menthol cigarettesTo stay awake, and catche...

  • March 2018

    An image that looks like needlepoint utilizing burdock plants
       By Oliver de la Paz
    Burdock Needlepoint, 2017, by Janna Añonuevo Langholz.   Diaspora Sonnet 11   In absence of blackbirds I give you a diamond-studded sky. In absence of heat, let there be...

  • March 2018

    Two intricate geometric shapes on a field of black with organic matter falling between them
       By Janine Joseph
    Lacuna (7), 2017 by Sara Jimenez   New Patient Intake Form In the beginning, there was a window I pried the blinds to make lightof my losses I fished my hands into and sh...

  • March 2018

    Three veiled figures painted in an early modernist style.
       By R. Zamora Linmark
    Veils, by Maia Cruz Palileo   Here lies Macario “Mac-Attack” Dacanay, 53, who went into cardiac arrest after winning the chicharrón-eating contest. Don’t blame the pig. Here lies Prudencio A...

  • March 2018

    Three figures working in tandem to hold up an invisible wall
       By Eugene Gloria
    illustration: francis estrada   [Number1Dream] A wall diademed with broken glass    can tear the skinof anyone who dares to scale the wall Hot box for a house, a tinderbox of electric fans ...

  • March 2018

    A surreal collage mixing a pristine snowy mountain landscape with objects from an urban environment
       By Jason Bayani
    Moonrise After Adams, 2016, oil, acrylic, interior design magazines, nature calendars, Pioneer Supermarket bags, plastic tablecloth, linoleum, and gift wrap on wood, by Camille Hoffman...

  • March 2018

    Light streaming down through the canopy of an olive tree
       By Samira Negrouche
    photo: chezbeate/pixabay Our dream paths crossand come to nothingburied in heretic fog Impenetrable silenceburns in your eyes Even speakingyo...

  • March 2018

    Dust between a pair of hands that look like a small galaxy
       By Jóanes Nielsen
    photo : randi ward The first time I saw Aleksandur Kristiansen in personWas at the dance hall in the Tórshavn TheatreAt the time I was convinced that poets were some sort of demigodsThat maybe they t...

  • March 2018

    Looking down on a table that has two pomegranates on it, one cut, one uncut, with the knife that opened the one up laying beside it.
       By Haydar Ergülen
    photo: nathalie jolie/unsplash Two Small Pomegranates If you want a garden to grow lookinside a pomegranate look long look deepat the core there’s a school and a blue girlthey’re a g...

  • March 2018

    A photo of author Hannah Lowe
       By Hannah Lowe
    photo:  hayley madden The Aunt vanished one autumn. Left the house,the children, the Uncle with his twitching beard.If I wanted her, I searched in photographs:the Aunt, sublime in a Pucci wedding dre...

  • March 2018

    A grove of narrow, straight trees
       By Kim Stafford
    photo: pixabay Dastgah A wandering musician from afararrives on foot, dusty with the journey,and quietly performs while strollingthe strange city, steps lightly alonethrough crowded...

  • January 2018

    A black and white photo of a ball of aluminum foil, shrouded in darkness, except for a strip of focused light on its right side.
       By Liu Xia
    above Liu Xia prepared her goodbye for her husband, Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017), in a poem and a series of photographs titled The Lonely Planets (courtesy of the author). For m...

  • January 2018

    The steel frame of a dock, not covered and thus exposing the sea below, extends out from a rocky beach.
       By Martín Gambarotta
    [untitled] Vacations in the ice, the London Manifestotransformed into a heap of stupiditiesan ultimatum for the scum, the day moon. Inertia: from theclean shoreto the dirty...

  • January 2018

       By Eleni Kefala
      Photo by Eleni Kefala for G. D.   It was much easier to tell why it was called the golden grotto than to get into it. . . . It appears to have been used as a cemetery, for rows of tombs have be...
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