Photo by Persis Karim
Shadow and Light was instigated by San Francisco Bay Area poet and activist Beau Beausoleil as part of a recent ancillary project of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (to…
Poetry
Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site. On my right metatarsus you can see the swale caused by wet wagon wheels coming out of the Big Blue River, heaving their sodden burdens over the top of my ar…
In your living room was a bone-colored piano. In boredom we pressed a key. We even sang. Do you remember? You know, just so something fills your rented apartment in Buda, and recovers its mo…
Only I never came back I was not going to be long —W. S. Merwin 1 I live where Lady Gaga files her taxes where the police do as they please where this paleface multitud…
Tonight she asks for enchiladas, and my sister suggests pizza. I think they must want to die. I’m ashamed to feel this. I roll the shade of blame down the living room wall, screening their lives f…
The girls who were talking in the corner not long ago are just now starting to get up (grabbing jackets from the coatrack) taking up their umbrellas again and a forgotten wallet that the tallest…
Anna 1 “Now I know how faces disappear, how terror nests under eyelids,” wrote Anna, Anna Akhmatova. Can you understand such suffering? While I read her, I lie stiff on the bed. She, Anna, has…
“I Have Nothing but Exhaustion the Size of a Forest” after Sirkka Turkka I have nothing but exhaustion the size of my daughter’s pupils, when she brings her face close to my mouth, ex…
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash The Bread of Letters I Who will blame the trees when they loose their leaves? who will accuse the sea of abandoning shells on the sand? I, mothe…
Ch’ol embroidered shirts / Photo by Diana Laura Montejo I Am the Alphabet They say, grass born in the forest, my body holds the freshness of mountains. I have absorbed the garden’s blossoming, my…
Don’t just aim the telescope at the night sky’s swarming to discover one more planet. Turn it also toward the earth, toward the bottom of the sea, see the fish in between the rocks, a flicker of…
Poetry is not solace, it is not a song of joy and of sadness, it is not a haven in the mouth of a blind man, it is not a museum. Poetry is not an almanac of meanings on t…
Photo by Nathan Bang on Unsplash I brought mum and dad an old quilt – It’s nice, only it came out of the wash with funny splodges on it. They can stick it on the sofa bed out at the allotment. “We…
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash On the hilltop A woman said to me This fruit is called kam Kam I take the word as it comes I write it in my memory Like the three letters in the word…
Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash I propose, my love, to be for you the surface to be but body for your eyes to be but rhythm for your tongue and information for your net. – Myriam Moscona…
The children see trees bending bending and then they are broken coconutless frondless. The children see roofs in various states of disarray metal sheets lifting eaves pulled away. There’s Takaro’s ho…
Last Tuesday I wasn’t enough of a poet to note how the falling rain would split the sky It doused the fires in my heart till its casing cracked It hammered the pyramids of my mind and washed a…
Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents, all the time past, are earth. But also language, words like Spanish, gypsy, black, or immigrant…
Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash The Alarm The television had announced the imminence of an attack. Would it be a bomb? Bacteria? A weapon previously unheard of? Everyone had long known their…
Painting by Lydia Rubio, “That sea at night is a sea of fragility” The sky over tonight’s sea is a mirror of glittering fireflies. Writing expands, attentive to this limitless sea that,…
you come and go checking on those figs your eyes scanning the eyelets among branches you leave the slums of the city the rain’s hand-pan roofs above the ruins you come and go checking on those fi…
The audio recording of “Simi” can be found here on the Musuq Illa website. Simi by Olivia Reginaldo Kay simiy ruwasqaykita atipanchu qilla qalluy qulluypaq qillqan Kay s…
Photo © Keiko Onoda A thousand countries in myself – There’s something that precipitates to the very bottom of such a feeling. Is everything just an image, or is this only a wasteland where images…
Photo by Artur Kraft / Unsplash Golden rice stands in sheaves in the freshly cut autumn field. I think of many exhausted mothers and see beautiful, wrinkled faces along the road at dusk. This is…
Lajee Palestinian Dabka Dance Troupe / Photo by Tim Dennell / Flickr I ask the olives to be gentle for they’re weighing the branches down as heavy as the stories Um Muhammad carries on her tired s…