To forget how you tasted those leggy afternoonswhen our bodies spilledlike wine across the floor, is to admit a hawk into the house.Is to wring a rag of water. When I’m in the thicketwith my smaller hungers,I don’t need to know every cave and what it stores, cooland damp, for you. I don’t needto know… Continue reading Amie Whittemore
You remember having lived once or twiceas if you’re made of secondhand sweaters.When you try to think up someone dearin detail, your memory, as every morning, failsto dream. It’s hard to suffer in one sitting,you realize. — Suphil Lee Park, from “Aerial View of Maze,” The Greensboro Review (no. 112, Fall 2022)
I don’t tell her that I’m looking at heras a painting has asked me to, or that I want to paint my poemsfrom now on, or hold her face between my handsas if she were falling snow. This is my mind thinkingthat in the movie version of the painting,that impossible light and the manwould find… Continue reading Bob Hicok
What you love is what you hurt.You cut the flowers to keep them close.Standing in the yellow field, you bluntedthe rain like a blade against your body.You shattered the sunwhen it returned.A voice called to you, oneneedful, oneyou knew. Thenlong quiet. Long quiet:you knew then,Needful one.A voice called to you once.When it returned,you shattered. The… Continue reading Leila Chatti,
The Body The body of a bird in your mouthbreathing songs.Raw light spills from your eyes,utterly naked. You must breach the horizon, once,in order to wake up.You must open window after window.You must support the walls. I let alphabets cling to meas I climb the thread of languagebetween myself and the world.I muster crowds in my… Continue reading Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi
Get that place into your pores. Who knows when you’ll ever go back again. — Melissa Kwasny, “Talk to the Great Suffering,” Bellingham Review (vol. 33, no. 62, Spring 2010)
As for me, I will enter the mulberry treeswhere the silk worm makes me into a silk thread,then I’ll enter a woman’s needle inone of the myths,then I’ll fly like a shawl with the wind … — Mahmoud Darwish, from “Not as a Foreign Tourist Does,” translated by Fady Joudah, Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 2005)
A Few Good Words I would say a few words in your ear. A doubtful man has littlefaith. Live a long time and it gets dark, and suddenly you know youdon’t know yourself. But I’d say them even so. Since my eyesrepeat what they take in: your beauty, your name, the river’ssound, the woods, the soul… Continue reading Vicente Aleixandre
I would say a few wordsin your ear. A doubtful man has little faith.Live a long time and it gets dark, and suddenly you know you don’t know yourself.But I’d say them even so. Since my eyes repeat what they take in:your beauty, your name, the river’s sound, the woods, the soul on its own.… Continue reading Vicente Aleixandre
We are all deep in a hell, each moment of which is a miracle. — Rob Doyle, from “Winter in Paris.” The Dublin Review. No. 58 Summer 2015.
The Vale of Soul-Making 