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 sit in the corridor, cross-legged like a cinnamon tree. My mama aims finger guns at me and I drop my sword. I’m sorry, mama,
I didn’t know this was a gunfight. As in, past tense, as in, do dolls wear snakes for boots? Do they call their mamas
at dusk? When the growth of cinnamon takes twenty years, do they wait? There is a flamingo in our garden, mama,
but it doesn’t fly. When you shot me, I understood that it was tea time and I poured you an istikana. When the kitchen burned, mama,
I slept cradled in your arms. When I call you to tell you my hairline’s receding, what I really mean to say, mama, is that I love you, and I’m
going to get the flamingo haircut. Like an origami stick figure captured in a polaroid—all edges, easily breakable. Mama, I will grow my wings
when I am a very old man. I will use them like trays, carry tangerines and saffron and your eyes, emeralds white as daisies, mama, emeralds
that melt like sugar in rivers of milk, mama. Hold my hand. Mold it into a gun. Take the bullets out and replace them with balls of cotton, mama.
This is the only name I have, mama—baba said it’s time I grow, and if god wills it, I will. I’m going to shoot the flamingo. Tonight, it’s going to fly.
Nasser Alsinan is from Qatif, Saudi Arabia. His poetry has been published in journals such as ANMLY, The Shore, and The Dawn Review. He is the recipient of the Bain-Swiggett and Polymnia poetry awards from Purdue University. More of his writings can be found on his Twitter page @nasser_alsinan.
Like every good son, I pull my father by his left arm;[night pouring into sunrise]from his tomb—his Legs holding unto the sand. The songs. The gaping quiet. The silence That keeps men company in their graves.in their sleep. In the solemn silence of Hypnos. I bring him to the dinner table —his eyes are voiding mine—slowly Swallowing my conscience. today, we’re complete on the dinner table. Nyx hides in the wind & the flame that holds the candle yearns to sleep— It’s so every year. It is why I try to not get stuck between the Pages of an incomplete poem. Erebus doesn’t talk, the empty vase on the yellow table beside Our family’s portrait sits restless. The 1435 is slowly fading off the skin of the portrait. There’s a reason Erebus has refused to speak since Nyx took the Wind into her palm; shrank herself into another man’s song— Long sang—long dead. We eat the remains of archaic prayers in silence and table-talk Moros & Hynos & Momus & Keres & Geras & Petulantia & I clear the dinner table after dinner, I sit Erebus on the couch, His skin, green—matching the upholstery that once held us together. Matching the covering of the night we used to plant sad songs beneath. Like every good son, this is the way I hold unto what’s important In the song I love most, with the people I love most. the empty vase on the yellow table Has grown so much; has shattered itself in the void before the living room, Buried the blame in Erebus’ palm & this is how I recollect Pieces of the memories I once snapped.
Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian poet and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He won the Splendours of Dawn Poetry Contest, BPKW Poetry Contest, Poetry Archive poetry contest, Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors (poetry), Hilltop Creative Writing Award, and others. He has his works published/forthcoming in Bracken, Poetry Quarter(ly), Rogue, B*k, Jupiter Review, black moon magazine, Angime, Grub Street Mag, and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu; Instagram: Abdulrazaq_salihu. He’s the author of Constellations (poetry) and hiccups (prose).
I Don’t Know What To Name This Poem, But I Want To Call It A Faint Synecdoche Of A Horror Story Authored By Stephen King or God.
Every time my pen kisses the pages of my book to write, I try to fetch from the hooks of the many sad songs//swirling in the mouth of a songbird. An attempt at telling you life is a beautiful homestead//tiled with forgotten dreams—the door’s handle, long suffering. I wonder if our forefathers created God when they reclined from the pain of existence & needed succor. I pocket life’s misery like a jewel & my father’s name becomes a chant for soldiers at war. This poem is about casting God & my mother in the same tragedy & making her the hero. Or it’s to let you know, dear reader, that the good things of life & humans are on the same field, knitted apart like bantu knots on a black woman’s head. Since poetry is about how much can be revealed with metaphors, what do I have to tell? I have learned that the verses of a cock’s crow—if anyone understood, is history being chanted. Or perhaps—man is a weird admixture of divine, flesh & critter. I once read a poem bereft of a title—the poet wanted to illustrate his metaphors as sheep without shepherd that landed good fate —i don’t want to do this & I don’t know what to name this poem, but i want to call it a faint synecdoche of a horror story, authored by Stephen king or God.
Paul Chuks is a songwriter, poet, and storyteller. He is of Igbo descent and resides in Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Heavy Feather Review, Trampset, TheAfricaReport, & elsewhere. He is a reader at Palette Poetry, Mud Season Review, and The Forge. When he’s not reading or writing, he’s analyzing hip-hop verses or moving his body rhythmically to the songs raving on his roof.
a. I was born with no language. Then, I was given my mother’s. My dad’s mother tongue was withheld from me. As a result, we became uncommunicable. We speak at each other. We stare at each other. Our voices are raised until one of us loses hope to be understood. We live in the absence of one another.
b. In this language from none of my progenitors, I hide my own voice. and what is that? In my first year living in Canada, I hoped for the day I could dream in this language. Dreams, the symbol of fluency.
c. The day my partner and I met, we laughed at my translations. Such as merde du taureau. It didn’t take long before I realized my languages were useless in my lover’s community. They acted like my father’s family: entertained that their secrets couldn’t be caught by the foreigner. The language of love moved like a betrayal on my tongue.
d. I betray my first language. Compatriots say that I sound like a live translator in my mother tongue. Time and distance make me a foreigner to all languages. Is my mouth a collapsed shelter? A place of semantic debris? My tongue, an estranged daughter.
Laura Mota-Juang is a Taiwanese-Brazilian shameless experimentalist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. Her current practices include upcycling clothing, photography, analogue collage, linocut stamps, drawing, community organizing and writing. You can find her poems at carte blanche, PRISM International, High Shelf, and elsewhere. Laura is the author of Light Spill (Block Party Press 2023), a chapbook inspired by Physic’s imagination. To keep in touch, find her on Instagram @imnofiction. Photo by Jean-Michel Moreau.
They are coming for you. You know it, deep in the dim heart of your Assembly code, in the same way you know everything else you know. Things like “I am a woman,” and “this a crime,” and “they will try to kill me for it.”
The age of the masked vigilante is gone – don’t you know Disney heroes all have their faces bare and beautiful? Instead, the boyhood fantasy made man-machine murderviolence now comes in the instanced Cyberhand, the gorgeous, pale technosassins raised in the crypt annals of imageboard militias and podcast conscriptions. A Cyberhand is a human DDoS. A Cyberhand is distributed among the clump of whatever most hateful and lowly biomass has clustered around a specific technocidal nexus, a choral outcry for bloodshed. Cyberhands are egregores, or emergent consciousnesses, or deepweb gods. One billion conscious hatreds focused on the back of a single neck. Your neck. Main Character Of The Week. Focused hot like a low-orbit ion cannon.
You know they are coming for you. You can feel it, in the vinegar sweat coming up your throat. In its taste in your nose. You can hear it in the piercing shine in your ears that never quiets, never quite closes its eyes. The gods are murdered. The new pantheon rises and there is war in heaven. Machine-kings with subwoofer throats howl into their Blue Yeti Snowballs. They push their devotionals hard from the back of their grinding stomachs. Full spit and diaphragm and shrieking metal. They command their apostles – pay no attention to the women who beg you for mercy. They are not women. They are something worse. The Hand is coming for you.
You know in a basic way. You know in the way your body knows how to eat and when to shit. You know in the way terror is chemical, the way death is mechanical. The Hand is here to strike you deathful. Even all your fragments cannot save you now.
The Cyberhands are anyone made out of meat. They are a white faceful mass, a congregation tumored from every schoolyard bully, every molesting pastor or priest, pedophile Soldier of God, every would-be Harris-and-Klebold. Souls consumed as a metabolic precursor for the synthesis of hyperkillmurder and ultradeath. They wield their numbers like a Beretta M9 against your throat. They lie as a rule – all of their lies things like “Your code isn’t worth the silicon it’s run on,” “Your body belongs to me,” “Your home will burn. Your beloveds will burn,” “I know all your secrets.”
“I know all your secrets” is the click of a trigger. It’s the shot of a gavel. It’s a sound that spells “END.” It’s pain and death for any homebrew girl. “Your secrets,” the sin, the crime, the inevitable thunderclap of Zeus striking you through ethernet for the irredeemable act of being a living trash girl. It’s any bitter word you’ve ever lathed. Any screenshot of a mangled, failed hex. Any vague curse under stifled breath. Anything to tip your scales from “cringe” to “killable.”
Know this: your terror can be keen or keening. Drink it deep. Feel it poison your nerves, sharpen them against your own agony. Hardcode your grief. Feel it disintegrate every hope you ever had for your own peace, shatter your soul into every new part it would need to survive this. You are becoming something so much more than flesh. You are, indeed, becoming worse.
We will never again know safety. We will never know peace. But by the wires that connect us, we will string them up. And by the blades in our wrists we will cut them down.
Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Shade Journal, and others. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival and a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award. Her chapbook, The Small Lights Of Her Heart, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2023. Nora Hikari can be found at her website norahikari.com and on Twitter at @system_wires.
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a mad activist, a shock/psych system survivor, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017). Website: https://stephanie-heit.com/
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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