Poetry
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The vendor closing up on Wolfe and Monumentdeconstructs the skewered souvlaki. A striped umbrella on a truck.Someone buys a soda. Someone rents the scent of onions wafting up.How is it upheld? This fo... -
for the sharecropper I left behind in ’79 Thirteen years ago, before bulk barns andfifth gear diesel tractors, we rode ro...
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Five years old, I am chubby, strong, husky, and brown. My hair bleached under southern sun smelling of saltwater, Spanish moss, and cedar, parted down middle pulled into pigtails, that droop in aftern...
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My dinged-up Honda sputtersto the next school, next class –Freshman Comp 101, where students in sweatsyawn away my 8 a.m. lecture and the new recruit quarterbackslouches at his seat, texts while his g...
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If you have a map, eat it.The old man wedging curb-dirt under his nailswill give you directions for getting lost.Getting off the grid involves talking in tongueswith other tongues. Follow the sidewalk...
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Behind our homes a road liesit suffers like a patch of skin alteredby its rash, a scarred spine, yearsof combined ruts. Aging fence linesborder the fields’ windswept grass. Retired from factory work,...
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In the year of our Constitution, 1787, our country was already over 150 years into the practice of creating FREE & CHEAP laborers for life. And in 1786, printers in our then capital of Philade...
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Photo by Mike Baird/Flickr Scribbles on the Poverty Line When I was a girl in a poor familywe hung our clothes to dry on the povertyline,and with it I jumped rope.My friends saw and joined me.We were... -
White Body Radiation Every day adjustments before give upbefore make do start where a clothespin clips a nose and breath is held until – What is a thing of beautyif it isn’t us? And if a body i...
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Photo by Takeshi+81/Flickr § Leaves and twigs on the ground Do I have to know the name of that tall tree to free-fall from her canopy? In my language there are 1,500 synonyms for penis, and...
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Photo by Bill Barber/Flickr Essay on Caution Unmatched is freedom from ties,he says, giving me a dark blue plum. I have frayed shoelaces and there is shameattached to these shoelaces, great shame. I...
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Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Photo by Carolina Vilches In the wee hours of the sinister National Night,when winter is nothing, and nostalgia can barely endure,I return to you, I shield myself in you, I se...
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Photo: Daniel Boud This is my devotion, then: to walk sometimes with the dog through the sclerophyll Cathedral of the morning. To let myself Off my lead...
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Translator’s note: Roubaud wrote the first poem, “À cinq heures du soir” (itself a nod to Lorca’s famous “La cogida y la muerte”), about Warren Motte’s dog Lucy, who shared with her owner a g...
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Ghazal Shakeel Badayuni My heart longs to go beyond the obsession of love,and find joy in a new session of love. Love drowned me in its tidesbut my heart hopes that was a mere dig...
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Placing Everything on the Line Zvonko Karanović A car stops in the middle of the screena gentleman walks out dressed in black, wearing a hat, grabs a frightened girl by the armblackmails her to...
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Blues Cola de Lagarto Su frenesí candentede espiral infinitamuere, revive– b...
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Photo by Bu Yousef/Flickr At the Market in Baghdad, 1940 Every morning the elder took his sons to pray,then let them swim through the heat of the dijlawhile he and his servant went to marke...
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Kookaburras in a tree. Photo by Jaraslavd/Flickr I thought it said on the girl’s red purseA kind of sad dance and all dayWondered what was being defined . . .The real love that followsEarly...
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The Suicides They ask: the world gives them a stone,revolving until the greater part of her is in darkness. Out among the night-stations the signals falter,the mechanism of the cell winds down. We can...
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Romantic Disagreement Of course I amagainst disturbing the moon.For many reasons.Not only is it an unseemly exaggeration—personally I’ve long avoided exaggeratingbecause of exhaustion—but it is also...
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Dipika Mukherjee. Photo by Bobo Lin, Shanghai. Dipika Mukherjee wrote the following poem in response to the August 5, 2012, Sikh gurdwara shooting in Wisconsin. My name is Simr... -
Illustration by Ciaran Duffy/Flickr The Blue Whale Our five-year-old daughter bubbles with laughteras she bounces on her bed, pure joy flashingin her eyes like the glint of fingerlings in sunlit wav...
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On the Edges of Autumn I shall close death’s doors.I am the autumn’s last flower.– Edith Södergran My body is like algaeExhausted by the night’s diving.Gather me up in...
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Following is a selection of four bilingual audio readings from Shizue Ogawa’s A Soul at Play, a collection of verse reviewed in the May 2012 issue of WLT. Donna Tamaki provides the...
