Five Poems from The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, trans. from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Freedom and solitude go together. / The hand is better at killing than the mind. / The way power steers truth and steers lies. / The way they steer your life. / From a place in the present, you choose the past. / You accept the tyranny of circumstance... Read More
Three Poems by Franz Werfel, trans. from German by James Reidel
The poison only masters life’s emptiness, / Food from sunlight requires its opposite. / God himself places this evil in our way / As a baser need of the soul’s well-being...
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Three Prose Poems by Sheila E. Murphy
Now I lay me dormant as a spot. The clock taps shoulder length and hairlines fracture plot. I think the story was a maze, and you, my inkblot, told the tale of me toute seule where I would whisper your soft name, the frame of it, the hemline brushing tile... Read More
Mom Is Dying by Michael Ruby
We have something we don’t want to know / A landing in our instability / A threshold in the taut pendulum / Without belaboring the ice / And transcendental opportunity / For a heavy eraser applied to a pointed object / The point lives between the ice and the solvent... Read More
Three Texts by Gabriel Blackwell
Fenollosa, whose invention was simultaneously Pound’s most intriguing and least faithful translation, writes that “no full sentence really completes a thought [because] motion leaks everywhere... Read More
Three Poems by Zoe Tuck
How do I write our way in without building a wall, a gate? Here I am looking for an answer from your words, forced instead by circumstances back into my inner resources... Read More
Editor’s Note: Vestiges_05: Lacunae
I return from a long absence, I return abundantly to the betrayal of words. The treason of my flights resumes as I announce myself a runaway, delighting in the gap of transit, the blush of ended encounters... Read More
One Poem by Gaby Williams
The world was right where I wanted / But I chose not to live there / I am going beyond beauty / Here’s the address: / The sun is setting / It’s seven o’clock / and summer is coming soon... Read More
Three Poems by Elizabeth Robinson
The hereafter is not without / pain because / its mute claim is upon us. / Smell of pelt, yearning in / a creature, / no heart but a pulpy bell / that refuses to move as we / diverge from its / yearning unrung... Read More
Six Poems by Christine Shan Shan Hou
A tongue is not a limb / but an escape route / Into the arena of tiny decisions / Where an opportunity / Presents itself in the form of a five-pointed star / Lone pawn overlooking pond of crooked pawns / Everything that happens within a lifetime becomes / Less new by the hour... Read More