You shall now become a man of rock.
A solid and sturdy man,
slightly chipped.
Tonight, we drive out of town. Dear,
your face is unfamiliar, so are your fingers,
your thighs, your calves. This body
evokes my curiosity. But in living bodies,
I’m no longer interested, they are more or less the same.
I hear God’s promise of forgiveness in the babbling wine.
From the rubab, I hear the clang of Paradise’s gate.
This is the difference when we hear:
you hear the door closing, I hear it opening.
Ida
Pierced the light
The air thick as fog
The black mirror full of moss
Is shatter-scattered now
There was a nearly suffocating smell: smell of old walls, it struck me like the melodies that resurrect in the heart the deepest memories. You know: on that sofa I wept so much when I knew you wouldn’t come back. And today, in the doorway, my soul of that time took hold of me; in an instant my entire past returned. . .
I sleep and everything sleeps. The bread dough sleeps in the bowl covered with a damp cloth. The jars are sleeping in the cupboard, each a womb of enameled glass. Quinces sleep, household suns, on embroidered bridal linens in the hope chest. Tomorrow you’ll be fine. Between dreams, I hear you. Tomorrow, you’ll run, as if this were nothing. It’s just that you’re growing. . .
From the spring of 1986 onwards, Vera’s abdomen, stomach, or something thereabouts, hurt. It didn’t hurt all the time. It hurt sometimes. It didn’t even always hurt in the same way. At times, it hurt more; at other times, it hurt less. They thought: it happens. One’s stomach hurts sometimes. It will go away.
Because my heart
is honey and soft wax
flesh craving a fingerprint
or just a dent––
I dream, defer, despair,
and in love’s hundred prisons,
die and die again.
The guns sing a carmine joy incarnate—note how, here, two figures of speech live in peaceful coexistence to narrate an epic event.[…]
Now she can’t do anything anymore, so, when I visit her, I tell her to prepare the salad, just to kill time. She peels away the bad leaves, and I tell her, “Throw them away and leave the good ones.” She starts, but then she forgets, so we eat the rotten salad and we mix it with curcuma and balsamic vinaigrette to cover the bad taste.[…]
And when the night draws its celebrations to a close, the hares undress all alone, sexes smeared from long storms. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that the body, yes the body, finds a desolate kind of beauty once exposed […]
Blame me not, but society, morals, laws, and customs Your mother as a pioneer was a martyr of destiny Someday you may come as ambassadors to Paris Find my grave, leave one flower for me[…]
Havana reverberates, resists,
bursting through the cobblestones.
Light years,
I sense a galaxy of infant stars.
I don’t use its name and it doesn’t use mine […]
[translated poetry] Before Spring A strange sound wakes you. Your heart? Your stomach? Just the pipes. Two-thirty in the morning. A pale lane of light pollution looms between the high rises on the horizon. Above it, a thin strip of sky. Like clumps of minerals in a newly discovered mining cavity, dim stars shine. The […]
[translated flash prose] Take this seed. Plant it in an olla that has only been used to make coffee. Water it lightly Tuesdays and Fridays around midnight. It will grow into a plant with black flowers. Cut them with a man’s knife and grind them up in a new lava stone mortar. You will be […]
[translated fiction] Dime-a-dozen, fair-weather friends—the ones you met to do nothing but sit around, drink beer, and gab. The night we hung out was of the same kind. On one side of the booth sat men who wanted a one night stand. None of the ladies on the other side were seeking Mr. Right, either. […]
[translated poetry] What do we know? Who then understands the depths of things? The sunset glowed in the rose-hued clouds. It was the end of a day of storms, and the west Set the showers aflame in a ferocious blaze. Near a ditch, at the edge of a rain puddle, A toad looked at the […]
[translated fiction] Right at the beginning, at that very first meeting in the park, there were twelve of us, half of which I didn’t even know. There, upon that gentle slope behind the house, you could hear the fountains splashing and the trams squealing down Kastanienallee. It was the end of June and rather hot. […]
[translated poetry] Excuse Us Excuse us for fleeing the wars that you fed with your own arms Excuse us for getting poisoned with the toxic waste buried by your powerful industries Excuse us if you’ve bled out our land, depriving us of any possible resource Excuse our poverty daughter of your richness of your neo-colonialisms […]
[translated fiction] “Martín!” “Ñoraa!” “You think the river’s gone up?” “Definitely, the snowmelt’s really letting loose down the sierra, bursting like you wouldn’t believe.” “Will the cows go into the woods?” “I couldn’t hold them back even if I tried.” “But be careful on the way back, son, the river’s treacherous.” “The river won’t get […]
[translated poetry] The Fourth Astral Plane We bolted from empty stores, Army bullies, Chernobyl, Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Happy drunkards euthanized in the snow. We were afraid that tomorrow another curtain would fall, And the pogrom-happy Czar would return, or the dictator, or the terrorists, So amidst the hot Brooklyn spring we came To the Hasidim […]
[translated poetry] “Tights” She likes the taste of her knee. In the summer, she’ll eat it straight from the skin. In the winter, she’ll do so until all the cotton hair has shed on her tongue. In her head stuck on the knee, the child puts together the things she knows. An ant rubbed between […]
[translated poetry] He had said, My woman, come to the lamppost when the coldest night arrives / There will be a rock / Sit on it / Or at least set your heart on it / The fog will envelop you from all sides / On this canvas of fog, your breath will be visible like sweeps of […]
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Photo Credit: Móni Szűcs
Photo Credit: Eri Takahashi
Credit: Nancy Falk
Amber Estes Thieneman
Credit: Arce Jebbel
Credit Vladimir Levashov