Photo by Sylvie Mazerolle / Unsplash
Assembly
Dear fellow carpenters and woodworkers,
I come with greetings of solidarity from the metaphysicians.
Among us the situation has also b…
Poetry
- Photo by Alexander Sinn / Unsplash The hour of hooded crows when cleaners fly for the night all carrion is eaten all bones picked and all skins farewell you unlucky trail explorers! only a wet s…
- Birds over Jerash / Photo by Omar Chatriwala / Flickr The poets’ voices sing in my head across distance, sing to reconcile to make peace through counterpoint but can’t work as they should. For th…
- Photo by NCinDC / Flickr He said: Why must they destroy and destroy again? Why must they forget my face my gestures my voice? Why must they believe in my absence even as I stand in front of them? Why…
- “A Fisherman at Lake Dian.” Photo by Yu Jian. Reading Glasses I am no longer young, a half-blind Homer, wearing reading glasses to see the world. The calendar shows that it is autu…
- On the Yangtze River, through the Wu Gorge / Photo by Perfect Zero / Flickr Summer Elegy for my father From June to June, as though uninterrupted, I…
- Photo by Russ Morris / Flickr Some may live just a block away, even nearer: the Walmart clerk who’d coolly hook a hot wire to your gonads, the grease monkey keen on beheading, the cleaning lady…
- The seacoast at Mykonos / Photo by the author In Andros, I Watch a Goat Run to and away from My Father’s Hands He opens his eyes. His eyes the color of its gray co…
- Photo by Jes Timms / Unsplash for Vishnu Khare How to convey one’s well-being over the phone, It’s going all right, All that is there is good or nothing is good. The main thing to say is,…
- Photo by Matt Artz / Unsplash I write with words that have shadow but don’t shelter no sooner do I start this page insomnia burns it not the words but what they consume is what reality starts occup…
- Photo by George Kourounis / Unsplash [I ask everybody] I ask everybody have you noticed today when the time passed with its voice of silence with its common appearance I had a w…
- Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle / Unsplash Four Scars for a Nameless Town 1 I come from a town with no name, no smiles of children under the trees. My town has no p…
- Tonalmeyotl is from Atzacoaloya, Chilapa de Álvarez, in the Mexican state of Guerrero / Photos courtesy of the author My Náhuatl They say my tongue Náhuatl has had her head cut off…
- Detail of Robert Aitken’s Samuel Gompers Memorial, 1933, Washington, DC / Photo by takomabibelot / Flickr What book he was reading – we still don’t know, For Shakespeare doesn’t tell us. Just that…
- Käthe Kollwitz, Pietà (Mother with Dead Son), 1937 (enlarged by Harald Haake in 1993), Neue Wache, Unter den Linden, Berlin / Photo by deadmanjones / Flickr / Original sculpture in the Käthe…
- Photo by Dave Phillips / Unsplash We heard the trucks pull up, the barking voices, a woman in the street –Irina? – putting up a fight. Each night, the bell’s insistent buzz, the foot-stomps on the…
- Sheep’s Head Lighthouse / Photo by John Finn / Flickr Author’s note: For about seven years now, Kwame Dawes and I have been writing long poem-dialogues that have so far appeared as four book…
- Photo by Kawan Nahaee Both a poet and novelist in Kurdish and Persian, Kawan Nahaee has a significant audience on social media, where the poems he posts often engage with curren…
- Photo by Richard Lee / Unsplash [A flock of cranes] A flock of cranes crosses an ashen sky the prophet is first to rise black lines cleave through the black air …
- Photo courtesy of the author for Rachelle 4/27/2020 Our moms were widows before they met our fathers. Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressed by Inglis die-cast toolin…
- Photo by Marco Arment / Flickr Sunday morning on the parquet Sunday morning on horseback Sunday morning picking lice from her hair . . . with a rosary and prie-dieu Sunday…
- Carlos Estévez, Self-Fishing, 2006, collage on paper, 39½ x 27½ inches / Courtesy of the artist Now the beat (there is always a beat). Now the drums and the darkness within. Now the dance. The s…
- Humayun's Tomb in New Delhi. Photo by VED on Unsplash On an evening stroll down my street, the azan echoes, stops my feet, reminds me it is time to pray, but I start musing on that day: Bhai, what…
- 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 other…
- 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…