our shadows spill together like thieves fleeing a crime through the last ditch of canyons, creeks sheer as hunters’ knives too crooked to find their way home. dusk pooled in hoofprints swallows the mountains as you reach up & pull down your omen, the setting sun. i wait for you like i’m waiting for a storm to start but you can’t fly with me hanging on your feet. coyotes smudge the dark’s edges ravenous as a stage swarmed with standbys but what’s worse is all this silence. you push the stars away & let the mice chew through your bandages, your open wounds the only living proof the gods couldn’t kill you. if there is a way out? burn all the bridges then the mast—it will be step by step through the black. the only light willing to linger through nightfall is a rainbow of motor oil that’s kindled one escape too many to catch a spark. you find your last dry match, strike it, & mourn its bloom.
fever dream sonnet with Francesca Woodman
the animal inside me has learned to stalk through ruin kindling strewn like spent arrows that skimmed Apollo. even down here on my belly i see your heels click & know the score. a spark so close i spit embers when i kiss the flint. living in captivity, people are known to mimic each other’s tics. as a boy in the projects it wasn’t just the convict in apartment 3 flashing his Beretta, terrifying even the Bible black pre-drawn, but the snake that escaped the clasp of my teeth. every serpent’s tongue wants a turn with your tongue, piss-warm fighting like a fire hose. outside the children skipping rope triple their speed. a hawk’s circle overhead is knocked off -kilter by a horse whip clutched in its talons. if you listen beyond the piano playing a lonelier tune you can hear someone breath -close savor your name pleading for a mercy kill.
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is the author of Murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, among other accolades. He has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programs, community programming throughout New York City, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation, Best New Poets, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two cats.
I pour night blooming jasmine petals into the craters of my body. Swarms of invertebrates peek out from tidepools, like swirls of dust rippling moonlight. The tide climbs my legs & runs away with my flowers. I shush the crabs who won’t stop banging their claws against the cave walls of my chest. I lie still until the echoes finish skipping out into the distance to where the water meets the beginning of stars. In the morning, you are curled around me while all of the crabs snore peacefully, claws askew, beside your synthesizer whose music blossoms & harmonizes with the receding waves.
lae astra is a queer trans artist in Tokyo who loves painting with sound, color, light, and words. Their work appears or is forthcoming in fifth wheel press, Bullshit Lit, Strange Horizons, manywor(l)ds, and elsewhere. Find them at laeastra.com/links.
An epitaph thaws with my breath and I spell what I have lost, on a wildflowered wall. The stones warm at my touch like parted kin. When the first Mughal
arrived from Farghana, he longed for its gardens and its melons. The centuries sculpted the plains into a likeness of his memories. The rickshaw pants
past the bright storefronts, past the rose-scented eyes of pilgrims and vendors. A charbagh greens and glows before me, like an ulcer in the hallowed mouth
of Nizamuddin. The last moon of December spreads like softened butter over parapets speckled with doves. The glyphs I etch on the wall are a fractal
of an inheritance. One more year when you see worse things than dying. My losses surface over me, fascinating as scabs. My Daadu reading Al-Kahf,
bifocals searching the ayahs for a different time to be. Daytime gauged in calibrations of power cuts. Gulmohar and amaltas growing
heavy with metaphor in a stranger’s poem. After the mutiny, the mynahs mourned in these very trees, the last free men. A season arrives
in apophasis of the last. The sacred fig still bows with the day’s lynched. Beyond the haze-soaked bazaar, a prince and a poet grow quieter in their marble
tombs and rooftops snuggle closer against the cold. Sometimes, freedom carries a life sentence. On Fridays, it carries a bullet. The butcher saves my father
his choicest goat shanks. A man asks me why my skin isn’t light like the Turks I come from. I say my name is foreign enough. I dress its uvular plosives
into the Hindi velars and stare at my own putrefaction. Sometimes, homeland is a lie you live until you belong or until you cannot. In a room
above a car wash, a woman lays out lunch for ghosts. The streets conduct a commerce of ittar and camphor doused in turpentine. The only living boy loses
an eye, beating metal scraps into answers for grief. He looks for a way home and reaches the wrong graveyard. In a dream, nastaliq leaves
the signposts, and I never look up. I read Kipling, perhaps Forster, in the panelled sunlight by a balustrade. I can only say goodbye
in Urdu-Farsi. Khuda Hafez. Zafar, the poet-emperor, murmurs as he holds the white domes with the skin of his eyelids.
I leave. You. I leave you. I leave you with God.
Nightmares Where I Meet My Past and Future Selves Moments Before They Die
It’s past noon and I’m done scraping years of grease from the cauldrons. So I turn nostalgia like gum in my mouth until it sores. Rub a poultice of figs and cloves on my teeth. I uncrease the bedclothes smooth as death. My left ear strains to find the kinder end of the pillow. The knotted linen hisses restlessly around my calves. My dead mother calls me from a sufi’s islet. Asks me to bring candles and oranges on the way. I run past the rowboats suspended in fog, heels splitting the still grey surface for a brief gasp of swan-wing and sunbeam—
I stand outside the glass door and peer into the uncharacteristic quiet of the McDonald’s drive-thru. The sky lightens and I spot bitten bread at my feet, glittering with broken glass. In a few hours, I will break -fast with Cheetos. In a few hours, the garbage trucks will roll in and make room for more hunger. The alchemy of civilisation. Scientists believe that the brain knows your decision seconds before you become aware of it. I am a wolf on sertraline, in the amethyst eye of pre-dawn. If fate is an electronic tremor in the deep dark wetness, saving myself was always out of the question. I pick the bread with my jaw, and with a sprinkle of red over the eastern skyline, swallow it whole—
I remember when I was more than half water and only a tenth doubt. How I could walk between worlds. The earth has faith like a bead on my grandmother’s rosary. Her hymn is gravity. Because the earth is liquid at its core, she holds on to all that she is given. Peach pits and bullets. Lead lacing her veins. The jacaranda, a rustle of purple ghosts. The godwits flying south and returning when the snow peaks coax the sun closer somehow. I crush cardamom pods in my tea and wake up a believer on some days. Because I am liquid at my core, God homonyms in my gut. I His script, I His scriptorium. He looks up through the oculus of my throat for meaning. I am liquid, so I love Him especially when it hurts. Think of water under pressure. Or boiled peas tendering. Or how the earth must embrace the first of the asteroids that will last us. On some days, I strip my insides with salt until light finds the breath of God and burns it out of me— — —
A cumulus crackles, its aureole glowing, and Mikaeel releases the heavens over Mecca. We weep, the Kaaba and I, until grief returns all the mothers in the world. Milk and honey flow from Abraham’s infant thumbs. An asteroid explodes in blades of grass. I pluck. I shovel. I periscope. I unearth myself.
Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, swamp pink, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, ANMLY, Frontier Poetry, Pidgeonholes, Apogee, Four Way Review, HAD, Palette Poetry, and Baltimore Review, among others. Her work is centred around the experiences of the brown Muslim body, collective nostalgia, and the aspirations of her endangered community.
Deconstructing the Mementoes of Oceans Flowing Inwards
black boy, black death, burnt earth: cyclone of ashes, an opening prayer for rebirth, a congregation of pariahs; the universe, a theatre of misfits, or maybe that’s what the interplay makes us believe. a black boy’s bone is the length of an ocean roaring with tides of chains; whenever he walks, every stride is a hymnal of clangs and his ancestry is an archive of clinks, the breadth of his sinking pericardium. he excavates his bones for a vestige of home, to unearth the lineage that pervades his dreams in series of folksongs re-echoing into alienation and the deeper he goes, the greater the dissonance of the birdsongs that deserted his forebears like tongues of shadows at the shores of the unknown. he withers into the darkness gnawing his viscera, and everything he ever knows is a grayscale of unbelonging. every morning, he sings bits and bits of the songs that refuse to stay like hallelujahs heralding a genealogy of brutality and bullets.
Poetry Should be About a Thing
How many bullets must a body absorb for it to be a celestial coliseum, erected for the admiration of angels? How many for a genealogy to be wiped clean like a slate at the bottom of the sea: what happens when metal is dropped into water? The trajectory of my bloodline, coursing beneath rudders tonguing surfaces of ruffled waters weary of archiving death. Ships, shrines of strangled dreams, and birdsongs adulterated by influxes. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but my ancestry was recreated with the finesse of a flying bullet. Poetry should be about a thing: herein, a bullet; herein, a base for dissection; herein, the dissolution of the song because its projectile is perforated. How many bullets must my body absorb before I see God and kick him in the nuts and ask him why he made my bones magnets for corrosive metals? Or maybe ask him to take me to the beginning, to show me the Venn diagram of my scars where sea overlaps ship, ship overlaps bodies, bodies overlap bullets and Eden is just a fancy name for the apocalyptic greens.
Osieka Osinimu Alao is a Nigerian writer, poet, editor, and academic. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He was shortlisted for the ANA-OSUN-OAU Prize for Poetry 2015, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2019, longlisted for PIN’s PWPC 2022, shortlisted for the Albert Jungers Poetry Prize 2022, First Prize Winner BPPC Soro Soke Edition 2022, and a winner in the Creators of Justice Literary Award 2022. His works are featured in ANMLY, Ta Adesa, African Writer Magazine, Rigorous, International Human Rights Art Festival, Lumiere Review, Poetry Column NND, Synchronized Chaos, and elsewhere. He is @OOAlao_ on Twitter & Instagram.
I am electric! I am a beehive of movement! I am a fire moving a hundred miles an hour, my painful mouth lapping up all the dead trees left behind! I am unfinished in my possible horrors! I am a darkening alley, a miserable shot of panic & I am awake under the bed. I want to cause a childhood fear so badly my teeth ache! I want to thumb at a nostril & snort up the moon! In the meantime, I will pulverize the sun & forget to spread the ashes. Look, look: my eyes are the color of peppermints & my tongue is as quick as a knife to the guts. I am relentlessly alive. I am a should not & I am a cannot. I am not a fox in the henhouse; I am a freshly-cleaned scope, a willful, steady hand—my body is all trigger.
I am electric! I am a beehive of movement! I am a fire moving a hundred miles an hour, my painful mouth lapping up all the dead trees left behind! I am unfinished in my possible horrors! I am a darkening alley & a miserable shot of panic & I am awake under the bed. I want to cause a childhood fear so badly my teeth ache! I want to thumb at a nostril & snort up the moon! In the meantime, I will pulverize the sun & forget to spread the ashes. Look, look: my eyes are the color of peppermints & my tongue is as quick as a knife to the guts. I am relentlessly alive. I am a should not & I am a cannot. I am not a fox in the henhouse; I am a freshly-cleaned scope, a wilful steady hand—my body is all trigger.
Broke Boi Love Song
So: if a broke boi stands in front of you dripped out in sunlight & he has a row of good teeth + a worse job & if you have a heart like an overripe plum waiting to bruise itself against his pride & if he stuffs hot fries into a greased-up bag for you even though he’s reached the crescendo of a closing shift & if the love keeps them warm on the long walk home & if he calls the drooping mattress a futon, presses his own back into the spiraling springs instead of yours & if you are just now learning what love is: pinpricks of blood between shoulder blades & fry oil clinging to your fingertips & if you have watched his mouth tighten into an electrical wire at the end of the month & if the lights were turned off because you went to the movies last night & if the lights were turned off because he could not hold a fight against a resume & if the two of you laid in the humming dark, counting out each other’s breaths & naming them after your children: …would y’all call that a date?
Levi Cain is a non-binary Queeribbean writer from New England. Their work has appeared in SAND Journal, The Slowdown, Room Magazine, Voicemail Poems, and elsewhere. You can keep up with their work on levicain.wordpress.com, or on Twitter @honestlyliketbh.
“Divorce is hot,” I say at dinner, because white men keep projecting their fantasies onto me, as if they’ve never seen an Asian femme with red lips & thick thighs & black hair & a mouth that never stops. If “Things You Can Do With Your Mouth” were a Family Feud category, I wonder how many players would say “kissing” instead of “eating,” or are the two pleasures really the same. Noodles spiral in our mouths as we eat our tomato carbonara, proving how “O” is the sexiest letter of the alphabet, other than “X” that marks the spot,
XOXO,
as in can you find the G in me, or do we need help from a friend in delivering the treasures & pleasures, maybe the Fire Man toy, and I love my heroes, but why is female fantasy so two-dimensional in media, or what about the Tennis Pro or the Millionaire, not Billionaire, because he has half a heart, or maybe the Poet. A photographer says “power” and I’m turned on. He brushes the hair out of my face, and it’s textbook, like the Lady and the Tramp move of sharing spaghetti until you smooch, which terrifies me, because that whole movie is about dogs
falling in love over pasta when everyone knows canines can’t eat tomatoes or onions, and I’m fearing for Lady’s and Tramp’s lives, even though I know the ending. “Power.” Position change. I always say poetic lines are like camera angles, or is it the other way around. We share a soft serve with sprinkles, the fourth-grade way of kissing. Power. Poetic. We share our desires through food: I lick our ice cream harder, the serpentine S of tongue—he loves that I’m a Snake Daughter. Is he a beautiful coincidence. I feel the S of his tongue. When I see “GF” on the menu, I think “girlfriend,” not gluten free.
Dorothy Chan is the author of five poetry collections, including the forthcoming, Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, April 2024). They are an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, and Food and Beverage Editor of Honey Literary Inc, a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.
1932-1933 the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine five million people dead. 84 years later at the commemorative ceremony Poroshenko in front of the starved girl’s statue knelt down with grace.
He didn’t offer flowers, but a bouquet of wheat, some apples berries. He probably knew only hunger flowered in the girl’s world.
I remember what my grandfather, long gone, said: wheat can speak but not everyone can hear it, which means life’s a blind road. Eternal grace is never clear.
Those who’ve passed away have always been here; always tranquility’s light remains.
Following the waves’ sound I come to this water. A man who’s never been to the sea knows most about what the sea is burying. The sea cannot be extinguished but it can be polluted. Like the history of modern civilization it contains evidence of being fucked.
This vast sea bearer of steel labor Adidas Originals to the other side. Once it delivered the blue-eyed gunboats, filled with our ancestors’ black powder canons. Now it buries a poet and his below the assembly line youth. The soul, imprisoned for his first 24 years is here. Lizhi, are you free?
I start from Suiyang, take a ride, arrive at Zunyi Airport, fly to Shenzhen in the Big Mac Beetle. I rushed to this sea under the scorching sun, no one in sight. Over the years I’ve seen too many withered youth in marshes in mountains on their way to breezes and the bright moon. Youth or poetry neither moved by the filth and blue of the sea. I’m here to complete some part of my life’s journey, to see how seagulls fly through a cold June day.
Where the sea meets the sky there are hidden islands. It’s said that’s where, for some years, the gods lived. Now they’re rowing the industrial sampan boat past palm trees, tall fluttering near the sea. This rotating fish-mongering wall clock’s been out of alignment for many years.
These two poems illustrate Nianxi Chen’s opportunities as he moved from laboring in China’s mines to becoming the Labor Poet Laureate in 2016. With this honor, Chen was invited to travel nationally and internationally and these poems reflect experiences away from his life as a migrant worker. In “Eternal Grace is Never Clear” we find a surprising connection Nianxi made in 2017 to actions taken by the 5th president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko. Readers can view an image Nianxi likely saw on the news as he related to experiences of poverty and hunger around the world. Nianxi wrote: “This poem describes my feelings and thoughts when I passed by a vegetable market one day. The market triggered my memories of many things. The thoughts about Poroshenko and the Great Famine in Ukraine come from a picture on the Internet. The scene is a commemoration event in Ukraine. Human hunger and disaster are the same. Equally unforgettable.”
“The Sea is Buried with A Dead Poet” was written to memorize Lizhi Xu, a poet and worker who jumped to his death at Foxconn factory at the young age of 24. His ashes were scattered in the sea. Nianxi wrote, “In 2019, I went to Shenzhen to participate in a literary event and went to the seaside alone to pay homage to this talented poet who died young. The poem also contains my own life and destiny, as well as my helplessness and sigh for an era. What I strive for in poetry is that it be concise but not simple. A drop of water reflects the sea.“
As poets and scholars in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) it has been our great honor to collaborate on translations of these fine poems. Kuo Zhang introduced Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor to poet Nianxi Chen and his unique voice to represent a life full of labor and hardship as a miner in one of the most desolate areas in China. Working on the first English translation of his work, we were moved by Nianxi’s personal hardships as a mine blaster as well as the depth of his reflections on the great precarity of the human condition. As his co-workers lost limbs and lives, Nianxi suffered hearing loss and black lung disease, using a barrel of explosives after work as a writing table. His poetry showcases the depth of intelligence and persistence that can arise from one of the many darkest corners in the world.
Nianxi Chen, born in 1970 at Danfeng, Shannxi Province, began writing poems in 1990. In 1999, he left his hometown and labored 16 years as a miner. In 2015, discontinued mining work due to occupational disease. In 2016, he was awarded the Laureate Worker Poet Prize. His poetry and life were featured in a 2018 documentary entitled Demolition Work about migrant worker poets in China. His book, Records of Explosion (Taibai Wenyi Press) provides lyrical documentation of the hidden costs behind China’s financial boom. Translations of Chen’s poems have appeared inTupelo Quarterly, Rattle, Plume, andPedestal Magazines.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems), and five scholarly books in education. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman award for Professors Who Inspire, and a Fulbright for nine-month study of adult Spanish language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, she’s served for over ten years as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism, judging the ethnographic poetry competition. Her poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, and many other literary and scholarly homes.melisacahnmanntaylor.com.
Kuo Zhang is a faculty member in Teacher Education at Siena College and received her PhD in TESOL & World Language Education at the University of Georgia. She has a bilingual book of poetry in Chinese and English, Broadleaves (Shenyang Press). Her poem, “One Child Policy” was awarded second place in the 2012 Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) Poetry Competition held by the American Anthropological Association. Her poems have appeared in The Roadrunner Review, Lily Poetry Review, Bone Bouquet, DoveTales, North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, Mom Egg Review, Adanna Literary Journal, Raising Mothers, MUTHA Magazine, and Anthropology and Humanism.
He dragged danger like daggers clatter across steel sheets
His danger covered the stage in letters
Absurd, his shadow a flitting pose of blood,
He hid himself in death.
There was danger in his sheets,
Two bullets in his bu[m]hole (sic.)
For being queer, it was said.
He lay down in a letterless grave;
Buried outside of letters, his shadow flitting dangerous.
The letters just didn’t become human
His audience a thin mask of letters
Jets of blood absurd jets of confetti
Four horsemen no four men in suits
He wanted an audience of sex and death
I’m laying him in letters
When we cry for jets of blood
Instead of death in cubicles and jail cells
The IRS and the FBI
Hear me hear our shadows flitting
The letters don’t work
He broke bread like Jesus bleeding in childhood
saying his prayers listening like someone was listening
Asking for his jet of blood
Proof of living (IRS letter box)
Is he listening to me now?
Letters never work
We want real REAL lemons
THIS LEMON THAT LEMON
POETRY IS SHIT PILES OF LEMONS ON A STOOP
BASKETS OF BLOOD SOURED
WE WANT REAL SHIT
Jets of death
Solid living lemons
I can lay down with
Because you touched me
Because I am grabbable gravable buryable
This is evidence
A real body in letters
(Or maybe these letters
(Look look the letters
Are failing
(
The Silent boy
The little boy looks for his voice. (The King of the Crickets had it.) In a droplet of water, The little boy looked for his voice.
I don’t want it for speaking. With her, I will myself make a ring That will carry my silence On your tiny little finger.
Far away, the voice is caught Putting on a cricket’s garb.
first and mutely mute sing spring of grasshoppers’ bodies first before the mutation loud bodies corpseing before the first corporeal mutation corpse of grasshoppers sing
The corpus
body of mutated boys
sings first
grasshoppers’ king
bodice
The mute boy’s
primavera
first
mutated
bodice
primera
mudo
corpus
Before
the first corporeal mutation,
the body of loud bodies sings: first king of grasshoppers’ bodies, loud corpus of grasshoppers sing. Mutely, boys before the first corpus, the body of grasshoppers sing. Mutation before the first king, the corpse of grasshoppers sing.
Before mutation, the body feeds mutely the grasshopper wings, so he may sing through the corpus of grasshopper kings before the first mutation the body feeds the boy the mute bodice, king first boy sing (the king of crickets had it) el primer hombre la pintura de las alas comiendo el muchacho cuerpo en cuerpo, rey en el rey
Translator’s Note:
I’ve been translating Lorca’s work for over 10 years, and I have recently begun an experimental project channeling the poet himself. Channeling is a form of translation, and over the course of becoming a “Lorca translator,” which I call myself rather than a “Spanish translator,” I’ve come to think of these praxes as the same. In translation and in channeling, I am listening. Lorca is a queer ancestor, and so I try to listen to his work and divine my own place in relation to it, which means placing myself and my text. Just as with translation, using channeling results in mistakes and misreadings which, I think, can be strong interpretations all the same.
My project of mistranslating Lorca by channeling is under the working title “The Lorca Book” in homage to Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. Both are in direct communication with forebears who share formal praxes and identities with the author-medium. Through ritual and invocation, Lorca became a sounding board and a mask for my author self, and throughout the book, we converse in the margins—which I think is what any translation is formed from, whether the translator chooses to hide the conversation or not.
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was a Spanish poet and playwright who, in a career that spanned just 19 years, engaged and revitalized Spanish poetry and theatre by fusing tradition with modernism. Lorca’s most well-known works include the poetry collection Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York) and the “rural dramas”* Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), Yerma (Barrens), and La casa de Bernarda Alba (Bernarda Alba and her House). He was executed by a Spanish nationalist firing squad in the first months of the Spanish Civil War. Photo: Federico García Lorca at Columbia University, 1929. Courtesy of the Fundación Federico García Lorca. *English titles are translated by Shoemaker.
Robert Eric Shoemaker is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Eric is the author of Ca’Venezia(2021, Partial Press), We Knew No Mortality(2018, Acta Publications), and 30 Days Dry(2015, Thought Collection Publishing). His poetry, translations, and essays have been published in Rattle, Jacket2, Signs and Society, Asymptote, Entropy, Gender Forum, Exchanges, and others. Eric earned a PhD from the University of Louisville and an MFA from Naropa University. He is the digital archive editor at the Poetry Foundation. Photo by Sally Blood.
Why does it recur to me ever oftener One Evenfall Dell, its Brook and Firs? One Star peers fathomably lower And dawns on me: from thence in silence I transfer.
Then I am drawn far from good Mortals. What could embitter me solely so? The Bells catch on to their tolls, And starts the Star to glissando.
Oft
Warum erscheint mir immer wieder Ein Abendtal, sein Bach und Tannen? Es blickt ein Stern verständlich nieder Und sagt mir: wandle still von dannen.
Dann zieh ich fort von guten Leuten. Was konnte mich nur so verbittern? Die Glocken fangen an zu läuten, Und der Stern beginnt zu zittern.
Evening Bound
Will no lovelier Bird sing? Each Scrub remains voiceless. Only an Imago with flowerful Wings Revels round the Field of abounding Ryegrass.
Sunflowers kneel back down to Earth. Tanned Shadows cling to the nigh Wall: Grave, sweat-soaked Horses pull forth, Through the lowering Land, high Hauls.
Gegen Abend
Will kein lieber Vogel singen? Alle Büsche bleiben stumm. Nur ein Falter mit beblümten Schwingen Tummelt sich im Roggenfeld herum.
Sonnenblumen neigen sich zur Erde. Braune Schatten haschen nach der Wand: Schweißbesickert ziehen schwere Pferde Hohe Fuhren durchs verwolkte Land.
Translator’s Note:
Like much of Theodor Däubler’s lyric poetry, “Oft” and “Evening Bound” both distill and cavort in the mythopoetic light and shadow cast by his epic literary debut, Das Nordlicht (The Northern Lights). Däubler describes the central image of auroral light as celestial odyssey in these exuberant terms:
I was overjoyed to feel that the earth contained within it much of the sun and this solar element combined with us to fight against gravity, striving to joined once more with the sun. … There is a gleaming penetration between that sun which has been released from the bonds of earth and the divine sun itself – and this causes the polar light within the month long darkness of the poles! The earth is longing to become a radiant star again (translation by Raymond Furness from his book Zarathustra’s Children).
In “Evening Bound,” polar opposites (light and darkness, earth/chthonian and heavens/ethereality, death and revival, singularity and community) are both bound together and released, leveraged as an image of transformative flight, and perhaps as a departure from an everyday process of binary thought and identity. The Imago at the center of the poem is drawn from the German word “Falter,” which can either refer to a moth or a butterfly depending on the time of day. Those who pin down winged insects may be called Lepidopterists, though the term “Aurelian” is archaic designation for them, drawn from the fleeting golden color of the beings who emerge from an aurelia, or chrysalis. Since “Evening Bound” is set during the liminality of twilight, or the golden hour if you prefer, I landed on the word “Imago” to preserve the union of opposites I felt in Däubler’s use of ambiguity, for he could have chosen one of the more definitive terms for this image: Tagfalter or day-flyer (butterfly) and Nachfalter or night-flyer (moth). Imago also carries a psychic charge: it refers to an unconscious idealized image of some figure that holds sway over one’s actions, such as a parent, or, in Däubler’s heliocentric cosmology, our closest radiating star, the animating sun.
Along those same lines, the speaker of “Oft” appears to me in a kind of liminal orbit, recalling either an apotheosis or exile from humanity that tightens as rebounds. I found it difficult to align musical and imagistic sense in English, especially in the second and fourth lines in both stanzas. In the first stanza, rather than “Firs,” I originally preferred “Pines” for its underground resonance as yearning; though I think both words, when felled, can be traversed as bridges to solstice traditions that center eternal light. Firs has a rhyming advantage with “transfer,” which is how I translate the two-fold ambiguity of the verb “wandle” here: it compresses the action of walking with that of transforming, another resonance of departing. This tension, including my own faltering towards Däubler’s music, is what led me to hear an operatic richness in the shuddering and trembling of “zittern,” the original poem’s final word.
Theodor Däubler (1876-1934) is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, prose, and art criticism, including The Starchild, The Starlit Path, With Silver Sickle, Hymn to Italy, The New Standpoint, and his debut epic The Northern Lights. Däubler served as the chair of the German PEN club, was awarded the Goethe Medal, and in 1928 was nominated for Nobel prize in literature. Portrait by Hugo Erfurth.
Sean Zhuraw’s poetry and translations have appeared in Boston Review, The Hopkins Review, Tin House, The Offing, Defunct, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He earned degrees from Columbia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he won the John Logan poetry prize. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Philadelphia. He lives gayly in West Philly with his husband and two cats. His Instagram is @toystutter.
a forced landing that forces me to spend six hours in Kiev when the plane approaches the runway and it seems we’re entering a storage site that leads to other sites more sophisticated more lonely more sad Too much has been written already about people forced to stay in one place forced to leave without explanation forced to flee a forced geography genetically modified foods forced to abandon their essence
I am from K a forced country She speaks in statistics and can’t stop staring at an Orthodox Jewish family dragging several kids and a bunch of suitcases
The number of dead has now surpassed the number of those who struggle for the liberation of any forced country of the world Which side are you from? from the ones who travel out of necessity or curiosity? who remove cartridges projectiles mines? leave messages decode decompose? stockpile gunpowder?
From the ones who burn or are burned? From the military-technical cooperation? From the United Nations or NATO? From the photograph of a country that isn’t a country? From the postcard? From the botany of not taking sides with anyone? From the seeds of flowers that have no territory? From laboratories? From experiments? From cellular chemistry? From the contaminated nation?
From all the girls with eyebrows mapped out like solar systems that live inside of me
To be or not to be is not a dilemma but rather to align with an army on one side or the other–of the river Jordan
I like knowing there’s someone else walking inside of me like an anchor-dog inside my footprints a built-in spirit who steps and coughs along with me who falls down and gets back up who corrects me feeds me and sees me in the forced future [its parade of dust] my prehistoric side I used to stand at the door of my house waiting for the moment of detachment eye contact with that other part
a forced root listening to itself grow doesn’t listen to the house invaded by other forced roots to be sympathetic
They came to Lima to study they brought their neon colors and music in order to multiply and grow they picked a piece of land or invented it or invaded it and perhaps afterwards they also invented the river surrounded by stones without water maybe even the house
Poetry sold whatever was expelled by the air it nourished the scraps that denied its own existence filled silences with the strategies of an architect who empties cities poetry wanted beauty they wanted cleanliness it trundled a wheelbarrow that filled up with ideals and mirrors forced to dispense with the basics: oxygen and water I saw myself transporting those who were wounded by its words
I healed their lesions brought them back to the world of broken wings brought them back to the demands of the market
I used to ask my father and not my mother she was worse off to sharpen the knives Poetry walked all day long pushing her discordant machine trailed by her grandson who was learning the trade and served as her eyes her Andean eyes had such small hands but everything: oxygen and water fit into her depths he was the future but I called him her eyes the eyes of poetry that looked at the present
The woman says we refer to god with the words of god in other words there’s a language for pleasure a special vocabulary for defining nuclear waste there’s electricity if you can pay for it pleasure but the census doesn’t talk about that god and pleasure like first love like the first time they become a drowned chorus
She’ll improvise a vocabulary for pleasure from her hands I’ll take the air the butterflies I’ll save my breath to explain to the soldier that his statistics are useless there’s no way to justify massacres femicides corruption homophobia endangered species that with any luck will be turned into sheets of stickers
A plan to industrialize Chernobyl should include maximum security for investors discretion and a country forced to endure it
The woman says I am a forced country showing off her muscle yes I can she is neither tall nor blonde doesn’t wear a turban and she won’t say it in English there’s a distance though she is right in front of me that’s all there’s a distance that reminds me of what we forget when living in a forced country
Before god there were few words She says there was god before
Este es un viaje forzado
un aterrizaje forzado que me obliga a pasar seis horas en Kiev cuando el avión se acerca a la pista de aterrizaje y parece que entramos a un almacén que conduce a otros almacenes más sofisticados más solitarios más tristes Se ha escrito demasiado sobre gente forzada a quedarse en un lugar forzada a partir sin explicación forzada a dejar geografía forzada alimentos genéticamente manipulados forzados a abandonar su ser
Soy de K un país forzado Ella habla en estadísticas no le quita la mirada a una familia judío-ortodoxa que arrastra varios niños y muchas maletas
El número de muertos es tal que sobrepasa a los que lucharán por la independencia de cualquier país forzado del mundo ¿De qué lado estás? ¿del que viaja por curiosidad o por necesidad? ¿remueve cartuchos proyectiles minas? ¿deja mensajes descifra descompone? ¿acumula pólvora?
¿De los que queman o son quemados? ¿De la cooperación técnico-militar? ¿De la United Nations o de la OTAN? ¿De la fotografía del país que no es el país? ¿De la postal? ¿De la botánica de no tomar partido por nadie? ¿De las semillas de las flores que no conocen de territorios? ¿De los laboratorios? ¿De los experimentos? ¿De la química celular? ¿De la nación impura?
De todas las muchachitas con las cejas demarcadas como sistemas solares que habitarán en mí Ser o no ser no es un dilema sino alinearse en un ejército de un lado o del otro del río Jordán
Me gusta saber que hay alguien más que camina en mí como un perro ancla en mis huellas un ánima pegadita que pisa y tose después de mí que se cae y se levanta que me corrige que me alimenta que me ve en el futuro forzado [su desfile de polvo] mi lado fósil yo me paraba en la puerta de mi casa a esperar ese desprendimiento el contacto visual con mi otra parte
una raíz forzada escuchándose crecer no escucha la casa invadida por otras raíces forzadas a ser simpáticas
Llegaron a Lima para estudiar trajeron los colores fosforescentes y la música para multiplicarse y crecer eligieron un campo o lo inventaron o lo invadieron y quizás entonces también inventaron el río rodeado de piedras sin agua y la casa
La poesía vendía lo que expulsaba el aire alimentaba la chatarra que le negaba un lugar
llenaba los silencios con la estrategia del arquitecto que vaciará ciudades quería belleza querían limpieza empujaba una carretilla que llenó de ideales y espejitos forzada a prescindir de lo fundamental: oxígeno y agua me imaginaba trasladando a los heridos de esas palabras les curaba los hoyos y los devolvía al mundo de las alas rotas los devolvía a la necesidad del mercado
Le pedía a mi padre y no a mi madre a ella le tocó la peor parte que afilara los cuchillos La poesía caminaba todo el día empujando su máquina desafinadora seguida de su nieto que aprendía el oficio y era sus ojos sus ojos aindiados tenían unas manos pequeñas pero todo: oxígeno y agua cabían en su profundidad era el futuro pero yo le llamaba sus ojos eran los ojos de la poesía que miraban el presente
La mujer dice a dios te refieres con las palabras de dios en otras palabras hay un idioma para el placer hay un vocabulario especial para definir residuos nucleares hay electricidad para el que paga hay placer pero de eso no habla la encuesta dios y placer como el primer amor como la primera vez se transforman en un coro ahogado
Ella improvisará un vocabulario para el placer de sus manos tomaré el aire las mariposas dejaré lo preciso para explicarle al soldado que sus estadísticas no sirven no hay forma de justificar masacres feminicidios corrupción homofobia especies en extinción que con suerte convertirán en láminas stickers
Un plan para industrializar Chernóbil debería incluir máxima seguridad para los inversionistas discreción y un país forzado a soportarlo
La mujer dice soy un país forzado mostrando el músculo yes I can no es alta ni rubia no usa turbante ni lo dirá en inglés hay una distancia aunque está frente a mí that´s all hay una distancia que me recuerda lo que se olvida viviendo en un país forzado
Antes de dios había pocas palabras Ella dice antes estaba dios
Translators’ Note:
Roxana Crisólogo’s latest book Kauneus: la belleza (Beauty) is a distinguished collection of provocative and formally innovative poems that give voice to the alienation and ironies of exile and migration—within a leftist framework that is embedded within the global struggle against structural racism and inequality. Set in Peru, Finland, and other regions from Mozambique to Palestine to Turkey, the poems offer a transnational, intergenerational feminist poetic, irrigated from the vein of 20th century defeats.
The challenging yet beautiful sequences in Kauneus delve into her family’s experience of internal displacement, replicated across Peru which has seen waves of migrants leaving rural communities in search of opportunities in Lima. Crisólogo brings this diasporic sensibility as she writes about other “forced countries” and the refugees who flee poverty, violence, and climate catastrophe.
One of the challenges of translating these poems that others have deemed as “untranslatable” is the swift thematic upheavals, the ever-shifting subjectivities, and the rhetorical leaps that mark her style. While not inaccessible at the level of grammar, the poems are multivalent and invite a synaptic, intuitive reading. Having studied law, Crisólogo deploys then subverts an ironic form of ‘legalese,’ drawing attention to the thick cushion of illogic that undergirds the dichotomies between the global north and the global south. Ultimately the seemingly unrelated strands coalesce into a mosaic that is both figurative and abstract.
Judith and I have spent a great deal of time and care in rendering the complexities and the lyrical dexterity of these sometimes-bewildering texts, especially this one and its complex middle section, which Crisólogo would describe as muy, pero muy aindiado: I mean really Andean/Indian/Indigenous.
Roxana Crisólogo is a poet, translator, and cultural director who studied law. Her books of poetry include Abajo sobre el cielo (Lima, 1999) whose Finnish translation was published by Kääntöpiiri, Helsinki, 2001; Animal del camino (Lima, 2001); Ludy D (Lima, 2006); Trenes (Mexico, 2010, republished by Ediciones Libros del Cardo, Chile in 2019); and Eisbrecher (Icebreaker) Hochroth Verlag (Berlin, 2017). An anthology of her poetry has been translated into Italian, Sotto sopra il cielo (Down above the Sky) was published by Seri Editore. Kauneus: la belleza (Intermezzo Tropical, Lima, 2021) is her latest book of poetry, republished by Ediciones Nebliplateada, Buenos Aires, 2023. Crisólogo is the founder of Sivuvalo Platform, a multilingual literature association based in Helsinki. She was president of the association of Finnish left-wing artists and writers, Kiila. She was recently awarded a grant from the Finnish Kone Foundation to work on the Sivuvalo project. Crisólogo literary work and projects have been supported by the Finnish foundations, Kone Foundation, Finnish Literature Exchange, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Kari Mattila Säätiö and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. She lives and works in Helsinki. (Photo: Dirk Skiba)
Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based writer, poet, educator, and translator who has lived in California, France, and Palestine. Her books include an experimental novel, The Woman I Left Behind, and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing that Matters. Active in transnational peace and social justice movements for decades, Kim’s writings have been featured in Transition,International Human Rights Arts Festival, Another Chicago Magazine, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Extraordinary Rendition: Writers Speak Out on Palestine, Gaza Unsilenced, Bomb Magazine, Sukoon, Mizna, Revista el Humo, Left Curve, Liberation Literature, and many others. In 2001, she won the Raymond Carver Award for short fiction. Kim is currently professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she co-founded an interdisciplinary literacy initiative that demonstrates the vital connection between classroom learning and social justice in the broader community.
Judith Santopietro is a Mexican writer who was awarded the writing residency at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2022. She was a finalist for the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation for her book Tiawanaku. Poems from the Mother Coqa, translated by Ilana Dann Luna. She has published in the Anuario de Poesía Mexicana 2006 (Fondo de Cultura Económica), Rio Grande Review, and The Brooklyn Rail, andhas also participated in the PEN America’s World Voices Festival in New York in 2018. Santopietrohas carried out research residencies in the Sierra de Zongolica and Tecomate, Veracruz; theTeresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Texas; and the University of Leiden, The Netherlands; as well as in New York and Bolivia. She is writing a novel on indigenous migrationin the US, and a documentary poetry book on enforced disappearance in Mexico.
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