Poetry

  • The negative outline of a person blowing on a dandelion through which a photograph of a dirt road stretching into the distance can be seen

    On Home and Migration: Two Poems

    October 24, 2019 Brenda Delfino
    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 “…
  • A man sits outdoors in a thin yellow t-shirt with one arm draped over a block of wood next to a wooden airplane model

    Perfecto Remembers La Lucha (1970–1975)

    October 22, 2019 Sandra Meek
    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 li…
  • The text reads: Litekyan, proclamation, with typhoon wind, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase, from alcatraces, pelicans, prutehi, freedom within constraints, Litekyan, twenty-four dollars ($24) in glass beads, Fakmåta Guåhan! Barsandbullets, we protest life-fire training range complex, prutehi, prutehi, gone the hurricane of further desecrations, Litekyan, we offer this treaty in good faith, this tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians, fledglings swal

    Calls to Demand the Return (for a Fair Price, in Good Faith) or, With Typhoon Wind: We, Prisoners of Conscience, Protest Bars and Bullets, Swallowed Fledglings, the Gone Hurricane of Pelicans (from alcatraces), and Further Desecrations

    October 8, 2019 Lehua M. Taitano
    after Ai Wei Wei, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, and various documents of protest by Indigenous dissidents1,2    
  • A fig tree as dusk, dramatically lit in purple from below

    “Light of the Fig”

    September 25, 2019 Stéphane Bouquet
    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                 Oct…
  • A young boy pauses on his bicycle on a gravel road with the sun either rising or setting behind a makeshift wall

    Three Poems from Kurdistan

    September 3, 2019 Zêdan Xelef
    A boy riding his bike near the Chamishko IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Turkish border / Photo by David Shook Non-Broadcast News Today a fire broke out in two tents The famil…
  • A spiny tree rises between sandy dunes as the sun rises in the right of the panel

    Twelve Egyptian Poems

    July 5, 2019 Muhammad Harbi
    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 I…
  • The poet Phoebe Giannisi and translator Brian Sneeden

    Three Greek Poems (WLT Translation Prize – Poetry)

    June 20, 2019 Phoebe Giannisi
    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 inside…
  • A whale surfacing, mouth agape

    A Poem from Mexico

    May 14, 2019 María Baranda
    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 underbru…
  • Thin, tapered, and lit candles arising from water

    Two Poems for Pascha

    April 25, 2019 Sophia Galifianakis
    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, ar…
  • A red balloon hovers mid-frame against a dusking sky

    Two Pakistani American Poems

    April 11, 2019 Meetra Javed
    Denisse Leon / Unsplash The Beginning Mother gave birth during an earthquake. She screamed, Mera bucha – my child. Inhaling, exhaling, withdrawing – Mera bucha mere pai…
  • A black and photo of a long shadow cast across what looks like a piano keyboard

    Isolation

    April 9, 2019 Gary Fincke
    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 ne…
  • Thick sheets of ice warp to reveal a dark hole within

    Public Works

    March 26, 2019 Brandon Rushton
    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…
  • A painting of a brown dog with just his head emerging from brown waters

    Quinta del Sordo

    March 14, 2019 Jonathan Fink
    A detail from Francisco Goya, The Drowning Dog, ca. 1820–23 / Museo Nacional del Prado I wish that I could find myself asleep tonight             in a house on the banks of the Manzanares,         …
  • Coffee dregs sitting at the bottom of a red cup, as shot from above

    Three Romanian Poems

    March 5, 2019 Ruxandra Cesereanu, Gabriela Melinescu, Ioana Ileana Șteţco
    Iain Broadfoot, “Epic abstract art” (coffee dregs) / Flickr   The Storyteller by Ruxandra Cesereanu Just like that, we used to talk together in the café, not sitting down S…
  • A statue of a reclining figure in a cemetery

    Five Catalan Poems

    February 26, 2019 Salvador Espriu
    Photo by Daniel García Peris / Flickr   The Pounding of Hoes The pounding of hoes — don’t you hear them? Behind high stone walls, unceasing, yet slow, beyond the folds of time. Th…
  • A sculpted bust of the minotaur, who seems boyish and frail

    Two Poems

    February 21, 2019 Stephen Eric Berry
    Mercè Cañadell, The Young Minotaur and Ariadne / Photo by William Murphy Night Shift at the Globe I am the Master Leafblower, a.k.a. Tornado in Rags: Sopped, half dizzy, ears plugg…
  • A desultory looking bar, decked with neon signs, presumably in Las Vegas

    Two Vegas Poems

    February 19, 2019 Rose Hunter
    Ty Nigh, “Atomic Liquor – Fine cocktails,” Las Vegas Desert View Overlook   the chipmunk’s prayer hands & hunched tremble munch & swipe at whiskers bat-like in front of bike…
  • Water lilies floating on the surface of blue water

    A Post Office without a Country

    February 4, 2019 Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee 
    Natalia Rifai, “Floating Carpet,” Srinagar, Kashmir, 1990 on Agha Shahid Ali’s 70th birth anniversary February 4, 2019 I In the post office, moored to the ghat, Secret gr…
  • A sculpted angel throws herself across a grave in a show of grief

    Two Poems

    January 29, 2019 Richard Hoffman
    Mike Schaffner, “Angel of Grief,” Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, Texas / Flickr In Which I Try to Imagine Justice   without a thought to efficiency, without a thought to deadlines, wit…
  • A large inkblot stain on white paper, through which writing on the opposite side just just be seen but not read

    Exile Dossier

    January 22, 2019 Nicholas Samaras
    The bruise of ink on white paper. The words that line transcription and record. I know I am more than this thin sheaf. The written name of my village can’t say anything about the openness of its…
  • A child's hand pressed up against glass with a moth perched on the other side

    Ask the Evening Light Its Shape

    January 17, 2019 Sean Thomas Dougherty
    Greg Jordan, “Moth, Glass, Hand,” Sept. 2009 / Flickr Before there is sausage and bread And blood-red wine Like the light Over the great lake Are you a ship Or a sequin Something so tiny It co…
  • A black and white photo of elephants trumpeting at the edge of a water source

    The Land of Regal Elephants

    December 7, 2018 Achy Obejas
    Elephants in Etosha National Park, Namibia / Photo by Richard Jacobs on Unsplash for Reinaldo Arenas I have seen a land of regal elephants, you wrote some years ago, not many really, back wh…
  • Poet Meena Alexander

    Meena

    November 26, 2018 Sudeep Sen
    Photo: Marion Ettlinger [Meena Alexander, February 17, 1951 – November 21, 2018]for David, Adam & Svati Name me a wordGreat, simple, vast as the skyA word that has,…
  • A close-up of a human foot in statue form with flowers laid before it

    In Gandhi’s Name

    October 30, 2018 Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee 
    Statue of Gandhi along San Francisco’s Embarcadero / Courtesy of Ilya Yakubovich / Flickr To the farmers who braved the police on Gandhi’s birth anniversary The farmers left their f…
  • A woman holds up a book filled with illustrations above her head

    No Formal Space for Intimacy (excerpts)

    September 21, 2018 Frank Sherlock, Carlos Soto-Román
    María Verónica San Martín, from In Their Memory: Human Rights Violation in Chile, 1973–1990 (2012), silkscreen, digital print. San Martín is a Chilean born, Brooklyn-based artist currently w…
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