Photo: Tanya Hart
Go Thee
And the way you gathered up your excess soulbefore it spilled to the floor.At the end of the Hebrew-Yiddish-English poetry readingand you went to eat shawarma.
T...
Photo: Andreas Manessinger/Flickr
Old friend, when we meet, we will meetas two shelves of wings and many harsh years, as one imagination that won’t exchange toasts:there’s no one to stomp the grapes...
Photo: Susanna Hsing
Rhythm
Lucretius’s atomic rain falls graduallyabove daily congestion, wetting my earlobes with noise.I’ve swallowed the good parts of several dropssleepy dissonance.
On one side,...
Photo: Claude Valette
Evolution
I was once a Paleolithic painter, a sensual hunterplundering the earth, living from hand to mouth.I painted at the cave’s corner, concerned only w...
Photo by Zsolt Andrasi/Flickr
Glints of the tram. The nondescript housesdream numb underwater dreams. Faces aretransparent bubbles popping off from the windowswhere water used to break through. The p...
Photo by Todd Slagter/Flickr
A Bridge
Behind us a sea-cliff, landfall, ahead the wind,tar-smoke, the sea, a carrick.We sway on a bridge between themabove a great shattering. We have leftthe verge,...
Photo: US Army IMCOM
Body
For Hassan Rabeh, young dancer displaced from Syria, who killed himself by jumping from a seventh-floor balcony in Beirut, Wednesday, June 22, 2016
& perhaps yo...
Photo: Train Photos/Flickr
A Swap
At the market bus stopI’m waiting with a man in ragged clothes,unshaven, his hair greasy,swinging his hand holding a big plastic bagwith “The Big Shopper” written o...
Photo by Kai C. Schwarzer/Flickr
On recent nights
בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַחֲרוֹנִיםאֲנִי מְחַפֶּשֶׂת אֶת הַבַּיִת שֶׁלִּינָעָה אַחֲרָיו בִּשְׁבִילֵי הַיְקוּםאַרְבָּעִים שְׁנוֹת מִדְבָּרמְגַשֶּׁשֶׁת בְּיָד...
Open book on a bed. Photo by Steve Petrucelli
9:40 a.m. / Venipuncture
The way they step on one another’s heelsuntil a spindle-legged woman with dyedhair trips in the queue, and all sticktheir nec...
Fragments of an Inexistent Whole
Inspired by Alison Knowles’s “A House of Dust”1.
Syllables sieved through floating gates, Metal clack of printer
Mortal rendition, Fortran...
Photo: visitmelbourne.com
dusk, Summerland Beach, Phillip Island
here they come rush of learners jerky gear shifts and no idea about cruise control it’s
a wonder the...
Illustration: Amina Rizwan
after Tarfia Faizullah
Here, by this tide of waste thatribbons black across empty fields, parched grass a girl gnawsand fills...
A collage of two images by Alex Majoli, created by Daria Birang. Courtesy of Cherry Trees Gallery (Megève, France).
To honor Mabanckou on the occasion of his visit to the University of O...
A stream in Pico de Orizaba, Veracruz. Photo by Anwar Vazquez/Flickr
xxxviii
Then they landed in large pastures, light aircraftsof gringo registrationfrom which som...
Photo by Julian Böck/Unsplash
(Heavy Water #74: going down)i.
the version of my father’s brother’s drowning i was raised on and preferis the one in which his frien...
Kathy Vargas (b. 1950, San Antonio), Oración: Valentine’s Day / Day of the Dead [Hand], ca. 1989–90, gelatin silver print with hand-coloring, 24x20 in.
You must know, Lord, who was...
The instrument did not choose this ceremony.My mother offered me five strings, nounswithout a grammar.I left my mother’s emptiness, to embrace my own.Whose darkness sits in the north,if no one can sin...
Photo by Jordan Whitt/Unsplash
U k’a’ajsaj a tuukul
Kin k’áatiktuntimbáe’Bix a máan a ta’ak a wichtu bo’oy táanxel t’aanilKa’ a wa’al ma’atan a na’atik u t’aan Yum Iik’.
A yuume’tu yu’ubaj a tsikba...
Kathy Vargas (b. 1950, San Antonio), Oración: Valentine’s Day / Day of the Dead [Rib Cage], ca. 1989–90, gelatin silver print with hand-coloring, 24x20 in. Vargas writes, “This seri...
i
There is no possible house any longer.If there ever wasa first one mentioned,she is now in ruins and does not await returns,or transient guests still confusedwho arrive weary to scrutinize the dust...
Photo by Paula Goodale
Thistles and Gods
Thistles and gods all withered in the sunLike the blanched remains of temples,Long and slender skeletons,Irrevocable examplesOf the burden of being immortal...
In a Warm Bed (An Alba)
by Tomasz Różycki
In a warm bed, the minute just before dawn.A blackbird has woken up and is tracinga figure eight outside the window. Belowthe sound again of unknow...
Image courtesy of the International Dunhuang Project
as if a drunken body carried by handcart placed in a comfortable room, the coffinis now being lowered
sutra engraved on the lidthough th...