Dear Prudence by Marream Krollos
Once somebody said that these girls we teach are only going to go on to eat homemade pies all day waiting until their fat husbands come home to fuck them. Only a dream for the rest of us girls in the world… our bodies having already split apart with ways men make war... Read More
The Washing and the Clothes Line by Serge Pey, translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
I learned my letters as I ate my alphabet soup. Tiny letters, without much meaning. For her part, my mother read the earth, because marks on the ground were the writing of the night. From those signs, outside the house, she knew that a fox had passed by along the road... Read More
Fragments from Moon Ring by Annie Le Brun, translated from French by Alicen Weida
Children of this century, avert your gaze. Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage... Read More
Carnelian by Naomi Falk
And not all touches aim to fix. We are forming something anew. I’ve grown my nails so I can brandish them on my lovers; to pass light strokes over their surface out of boredom or to leave gestural trenches of punctured sin. I often confront our seeking of pain during intimacy within the context of... Read More
Six Prose Poems by Alistair McCartney
When I die, my memory—or do I mean your memory of me?—will dissolve like the Platonic (abstract) form of a cube of sugar in a cup of tea, like the post-abstract expressionist (Neoplatonic) form of the corpse of a boy in a hot pink ceramic tub of hydrochloric acid, correction: sodium hydroxide... Read More
Two Poems by Sawako Nakayasu
Girl F’s the getting, and tiredness is the reference, and the other is girled by their initials. There’s the decisive finding, that is, the name-outer, the girl-eacher, the come what may, but there are also some extremely marching shes, which makes Girl J say very well why there was so much Hi, name, fuck, of... Read More
Excerpt from Agnomia by Róbert Gál, translated from Slovak by David Short
Even errantry has paths to follow. One could speak of being freed of the compassion that necessarily follows from circumstances. In her case, this means that when they’re dancing and she’s twirling around them she’s the only one who’s not dancing... Read More
The Lydian by Théodore de Banville, translated from French by Patricia Worth
Not long ago and not far away, a sculptor in love with his statue, as in the days of Pygmalion the King of Cyprus, reproduced the same miracle and brought her to life, transforming the marble into living flesh through which glorious blood flowed by his will and the force of his overpowering desire... Read More
Two Prose Poems by Michael Trocchia
He left the shovel out back, leaning against the elm; he left his radio on, tuned to a static sense of time, a pair of wet boots at the pedals of the piano, and his wool cloak, stained with wild game, draped carefully across the keys, as if to warm the heart of a winter... Read More