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 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.
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.
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