marjorie agosin is a Chilean-American poet, editor, and human rights activist. She is the Luella Laneer Slain Professor of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. She has received numerous awards for her poetry and human rights work, and has authored more than forty books of poetry, memoirs, and essays, as well as two plays. charles…
translated from the French by Anne Atik Small crystal globe, Earth’s small globe, Through you I see My lovely glass bowl. We’re all locked up In your hard strict breast But so polished, so glossed Rounded by light. Like this horse running Or a lady who halts Or the flower on her dress A child…
remembering Lem Norrell All those rhetorical contraptions of the metaphysicals prying us loose from the world! And those licentious exhortations to squeeze the day! Something about the Anglican burial brought those back, and with them your voice rousing those metaphors off the page. It’s not like I didn’t get a heads-up, right? But…
In a time zone all our own, we were a bubble of the past, a cleanser upon the last sentence of history. Lazing through tangled medieval lanes we offered everyone a do-over, a mulligan, and as time flowed backwards to greet us we imagined the world transformed— gashes were healed by knives, seatbelts were remembered,…
Where is it, the semaphore branch or bellwether sounding a trail over hill, dale, parking lot . . . leaves down, birds vanished, only a left-over tic and shiver while overhead roar the test flights, free-fall shadows stippling the defunct garden thick with invasives, those exogamous brides. I ask for bread, someone hands me a…
translated by Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey A young Tibetan sits in the sand by Zha Ling Lake. He is skinny and about eighteen. The throbbing sun scorches his thick dark hair. The lake is silent before him, a steely blue. The Kunlun Mountains reach up beyond the lake, iced snow coating the tops, peak…
We melt the old thing into the new thing. Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head I fill with thoughts of molten steel. Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes, in the right hand of the man coming back from the bathroom with his skin mag. He’d tell me, were I to ask,…
Starts in estuary whelm and whirl of rock-skin, sea-swell, the hove called salt. I loved the hero-to-be, his life first arrowed unto me, scudding, spared, still unconscious. No he and she to wash away yet, my inhale planked to his ex—. Plus our everywhere wet…
translated by Clare Cavanagh Late afternoon, light snow. The Musée d’Orsay is on strike, beside it a gray lump huddled on the sidewalk’s edge: a bum curled in a ball (maybe a refugee from some country caught in civil war) still lying on the grate, packed in a quilt, a scrap-heap sleeping bag, the right…
No products in the cart.