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...

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...

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...

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...

    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...

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...

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...

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 Simra...

  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...

Audio versions read by the author Editorial note: Geoffrey Philp’s interview with Erika J. Waters appears in the May 2012 issue of WLT on pages 24–29.     A Prayer for My...

 January 2007 WLT I am fingering a length of yarnfrom the mill at Stornoway.It is green as a summer meadowthough when I untwine it widdershinsI see, spun into the yarn, fibres of blu...

 March 2011 WLT Clouds gather under a blue moon, like trouble brewing as strange fruit continues to swing – keeping time – while Columbia turntables refuse to spin the song; is vinyl...