Three Prose Poems by Yoo Heekyung, trans. from Korean by Stine Su Yon An
i am so very curious about the thing you said you’d planted and i wonder why you are so sick of such peonies, you who would have brushed off your hands loudly after planting them... Read More
Four Poems by Emmanuel Merle, trans. from French by Jeffrey Jullich
These people, it’s simple, / they’re like creases in reality, folds found / in rocks, bulges on tree trunks, these strange / bodies wound the pupil of my eye, forcing me to look... Read More
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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Record of a Tryst In Tokyo by Eisuke Yoshiyuki, trans. from Japanese by Marissa Skeels
The jazz grew fiercer in the colored spotlight’s rays, as if sobbing or adrift on rough beats, spitting tapes of lust as white as seed... Read More
The Washing and the Clothes Line by Serge Pey, trans. 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, trans. 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
Excerpt from Agnomia by Róbert Gál, trans. 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, trans. 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
Saint-Ouen | Stalingrad by Marie Silkeberg, trans. from Swedish by Kelsi Vanada
Rashomon. The Demon’s Gate you say. / I understood that it had opened. / Only a few more seconds. And it would be opened wide. / Time would stratify. / It snowed. The first snow fell... Read More