Poetry
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December 18, 2019 |
Photo by Eric Parker / Flickr A Cuban writer living in the US writes a requiem for Havana, a city of contradictions, to mark its five hundredth year. Havana just turned five hundred. The be... -
December 17, 2019 |
Photo by T Foz / Unsplash Alphabets of My Heart Because I am from East and West a mother with two alphabets and I must not love one more than the other if they are to grow up and love each othe... -
December 11, 2019 |
Photo by Kea Mowat on Unsplash Dear WLT Readers, I am thrilled to offer the following translation of “Eagle Poem” from English to Arabic in honor of poet Joy Harjo who, this year, was named... -
December 9, 2019 |
You Will Grow Together in Your Rage, illustration by Meg Lionel Murphy. This piece originally accompanied Barbara Jane Reyes, “Three Tracks from Brown Girl Mixtape” from the Autumn... -
November 21, 2019 |
Photo by Ervins Strauhmanis / Flickr 1 We maintain antiquity and elegance on paper; inside we are full of shame. We present heaven and hell on paper; our self-disgust results fro... -
November 1, 2019 |
Dorothy Wang of Williams College, Ammiel Alcalay of the Graduate Center City University of New York (CUNY), and Sesshu Foster at the CUNY Graduate Center, March 27, 2018 / Photo courtesy of the auth... -
October 28, 2019 |
Many poets, writers, and thinkers have dwelled on the meaning of poetry following great tragedy, with Theodor Adorno’s claim that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism an... -
October 28, 2019 |
Photo by Bryan Kuwada Aunty says She climbed a ninety-foot cliff in the dark Traced the scars of a long-forgotten waterfall Cried as she felt the green disappearing under her fingertips And I le... -
October 24, 2019 |
Photo collage courtesy of the author El Matador after Argentina’s World Cup Victory in 1978 La Patria comes dressed in multiple costumes, during the... -
October 23, 2019 |
Georg Rafisch, “headless,” 2015 / Flickr When I lived in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I made a point of stopping in San Francesco a Ripa whenever I was running errands. The church houses Ber... -
October 22, 2019 |
Perfecto Santiago / Courtesy of the author Culebra, Puerto Rico, 2018 Let us sit in the open air where days I work, my hands shaping a small plane out of sticks. I tell you only what I l... -
September 25, 2019 |
Photo: AndyM / Flickr I imagine the crocuses also sometimes come down unexpectedly feverish, spreading their long green leaves through the wrong season. So it’s Oc... -
August 12, 2019 |
Photo by Shevaun Williams A well-traveled road in our collective consciousness is the question of what it means to be human. Joy Harjo is a master of this examination and delves through layers of or... -
July 5, 2019 |
Chris Barnes, Egypt, December 2010 / Flickr To Hisham Harbi who said to me: “don’t stay in the shadows” but I didn’t listen Epigraph rushing as always, my shadow jumped but... -
June 20, 2019 |
The poet Phoebe Giannisi and WLT Translation Prize (Poetry) winner Brian Sneeden Leaves Inside these articulations the beginnings of language outside of yes and no insid... -
June 13, 2019 |
Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy in 2013. Edwidge Danticat won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.... -
June 11, 2019 |
Paulo Valdivieso, Porto das Hortas / Flickr Portugal was rocked earlier this year by the news that one of the most popular poems attributed to one of the nation’s greatest modern poets, Sophia de Me... -
June 4, 2019 |
Photo: Chandrashekhar Basumatary / Flickr The cover of Rudencio Morais’s collection of prose poems, Os dialetos do Amor (filLetras Editora, 2018; The languages of love), features a woman co... -
May 14, 2019 |
Humpback whale / Photo by Wade Tregaskis / Flickr 7. For about a minute you spin and the world shifts galaxies. What germinates in your flesh is the viper’s dream. You slither through the underbr... -
May 9, 2019 |
Ahmad Shamlou (left) | Photo by Hadi Shafaieh. Niloufar Talebi (right) | Photo by Devlin Shand In Self-Portrait in Bloom, Niloufar Talebi (www.niloufartalebi.com) tells her story of gro... -
April 25, 2019 |
Photo by Dennis Jarvis / Flickr Bema In Greek it means step. In church it separates me from the nave, where the quiet sit and wait. Behind the screen the altar boys, age twelve, a... -
April 11, 2019 |
Denisse Leon / Unsplash The Beginning Mother gave birth during an earthquake. She screamed, Mera bucha – my child. Inhaling, exhaling, withdrawing – Mera bucha mere pa... -
April 9, 2019 |
Richard Smith, “Piano Shadow” / Flickr A day without news. Left behind, last night’s lead story – a friend’s untimely death, his son surviving the head-on two miles from home. This evening, my n... -
April 1, 2019 |
To kick off National Poetry Month, I’d like to share with you five favorite poets/poems that have appeared in the magazine’s pages over the past five years. Zsuzsa Takács (Hungary), “On Vision” and “... -
March 26, 2019 |
Ellenm1, ice formations, Barton Dam, Michigan / Flickr Dismissed from some other duty the drawbridge attendant questions the stability of days. As in: how long until what we’ve been holding on to...
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