Five Poems from The Cheapest France In Town by Seo Jung Hak, trans. from Korean by Megan Sungyoon
The heart was about to explode when the pipe was raised, still bleeding. The length of happiness was inversely proportional to fear, that bold solidity. Disgusting laughter echoed around. I, too, almost cried... Read More
Five Prose Poems from Data Mind by Joanna Fuhrman
I was looking up anagrams of my middle name when I heard a scratching from uncategorized bivalves establishing a new species beneath the carpet. Thus began my life as a clam-cognizant, neo-olfactory, intra-confessional, proto-shambolic coordinologist, and ended my career as a poet... Read More
Five Prose Poems by Cole Swensen
A former sun, a warmer form of falling on, fallen now, warmly in grass, while the sun in your hand is a lonelier one, so you hold it more closely, and a light deep inside the body wanders back. Or perhaps it’s that, fallen in grass, the oranges glowing in the late slanted light return... Read More
Four Prose Poems from Outskirts of the World by María Negroni, trans. from Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero
How does a disciplinary sea compare to a didactic sea? Or a choppy sea to a verbalized sea? You never know. Meanwhile, this sea begins to seem remarkably like the sea. You only need to wait for the day and night of reality. The sea’s strategy is its own concern... Read More
The Swine King by Michael Jeffrey Lee
“First,” he said, shouting, even though his advisors were quite close, “know that I have exhausted every means of keeping myself alive, and when I leave you at last, it will not be by choice. But even so, all animals must die, even great ones, and my time is swiftly approaching...” Read More
Excerpts from Crane by Tessa Bolsover
I awake and the boughs, battered and paddling against the window, bruise shadows in the hardwood. Amplified by rain, the sounds inside resonate like pieces of a disassembled object. Slowly, words begin to spread with a viscous clarity over everything... Read More
Three Po-Proses by Kim Hyesoon, trans. from Korean by Jack Jung
We question and answer to be nearer to “poetry.” / Literature is inherently unreal. / Poetry lies against the conventional use of language and / Fiction lies against the conventional use of reality. / Perhaps, a writer is someone who knows that after we disappear, what will remain is our lies... Read More
Excerpt from The only name we can call it now is not its only name by Valerie Hsiung
We are swimming and smiling with fate, that is if we could, if we could move beyond the barrier which keeps us practically mute and immobile. Otherwise, it may be conceived as akin to something that resides be-tween negligence and happenstance, between dubious absence and absentmindedness, that is what is residual... Read More
Three Prose Poems by Theodore Worozbyt
As dark memories say to themselves, the only flower to grow now and then is nasturtiums, little elephant’s ears. My grandmother opened her eye and sang the bitter batter butter song. Under the case the pillow was striped in indigo. And then a kiss like a windflower came and had a final note written on... Read More
Excerpt from No Material by Losarc Raal
Times will change the cobalt heaven tongues. I walk people into water past the hippo lights. Black model railroad track. Doctor of the upper wake plea. My heart is hollow; my skin waives tears... Read More