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 it…
Poetry
January 22, 2019
January 17, 2019Greg 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 tin…
December 7, 2018Elephants 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…
November 26, 2018Photo: Marion Ettlinger[Meena Alexander, February 17, 1951 – November 21, 2018]for David, Adam & SvatiName me a wordGreat, simple, vast as the skyA word that has, li…
October 30, 2018Statue of Gandhi along San Francisco’s Embarcadero / Courtesy of Ilya Yakubovich / FlickrTo the farmers who braved the police on Gandhi’s birth anniversaryThe farmers left their fiel…
September 21, 2018María 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 wo…
September 4, 2018Photo by Andrew Neel / Unsplash Journal, or Story Without WordsAnd I follow the hand copying what it had written years ago,never knowing it woul…
August 10, 2018Photo by Sabah El Bashaheirloom Ninety thousand men, women and childrendragged their dust to rivers,dams were never built for.Under six cataractslie the bones of my ancestors.Under my bed is the…
August 7, 2018Sunset on Ithaka by T. Zengerink / FlickrOnce on IthacaWalking the harbor that day, I saw a cronesitting at a loom on her front porch.Was this Penelope, I wondered, weavingin midday h…
August 2, 2018Photo by Paul Streltsov / Unsplash Grief that is now old, I ask it to come and sit near me today.I’m sitting, there’s my shadow, and if grief indeed comes and sits beside meI will feel quite good…
July 26, 2018Photo: Peter DresselProtective by defaultaffectionate by designapron, youare my mother:sweet bread bakingblue veins racingdown white expansedotted with delicioussplatter and spill.My mother woreyou we…
July 18, 2018Photo by Michał Mancewicz / UnsplashBathing with Tender Care And not this time the body of my child,but my own skin, loving the wrinkled kneesand the scars dealt the…
June 26, 2018Photo (left to right) - Translator Rowena Galavitz (courtesy of Emerson Richards) and author Paula Ilabaca Núñez He’ll hang the heartsBlack…
June 19, 2018LifecyclesI was chatting with your executioner,a sweet, tidy man.He said because it’s me,I could choose the way you go out.He said when Eskimos get old,they wan…
May 30, 2018Photo by Atlas Green / Unsplash Boy for DorsenNever seen him in a school uniform.Inste…
April 17, 2018Mürtüz Yolcu (Enver) and Mansou Ciss (Otello) producing the radio play Blumen für Otello, April 9, 2014 / Photo by Sandro Most courtesy of Deutschlandradio Author’s note: Flower…
April 5, 2018Courtesy of Natalia_Kollegova/Pixabay Ibis The Ibis, in Egypt, was not a bird,he was Thoth, the god in the pyramidwith my heart in his scimitar beak.We are…
January 8, 2018Photo by Inhabitat/ FlickrHappy New YearEveryone’s waiting for the ball to drop.The President’s son-in-law is going to jail.Or maybe not.Information…
October 3, 2017Mural in Cochabamba, Bolivia / Photo by proyecto mARTaderoFor more on the poetry of Valdivia, read the companion essay by Margaret Randall. Aullido poema octogonalEn el graznido de mi no…
September 26, 2017Samoylov as a soldier in the Red Army in the 1940sTranslator’s note: In June 1944 David Samoylov (1920–1990), an important Russian-language poet who was then a soldier in the Red Army, was se…
September 20, 2017This view of Saturn’s rings from the “ringscape finale” series was among the last images Cassini sent back to Earth (September 13, 2017) / Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute…
September 13, 2017Gillie Rhodes, “Log pile,” November 7, 2009Late Autumn A butterfly searches our garden plants for blossoms I don’t see. Flitting, almost lurching, it lands at last on a ba…
September 7, 2017Grave at the US/Mexico border taken at a cemetery near Anthony, New Mexico, July 19, 2015 / Photo by Lanie ElizabethThe following is an excerpt from part 2 of a four-part poem called “The…
September 6, 2017Liu Xiaobo, 1991 / Courtesy of Wang YaTranslator’s note: This photo of Liu Xiaobo swimming surfaced on the Internet after the sea burial in Dalian, China. Those of us who were heartb…
August 30, 2017Bury Metell me wet limestone flinching coral reefs what’s it li…
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