translated by Lyn Coffin, with Leda Pugh The earth opened wide. Rain, a doctor, dripped remedies. All night, moving down the mountainsides were molten seas. You, my fevered country, now must spend your last moments caught in delirium’s coil— peacefully, tenderly, you ask at the end: Where’s the boil? 2 My soul, your wind died…
translated by Clare Cavanagh When he described the park, the path, sick fires glowed in his cooling eyes, his voice grew stronger and his hands tried to be what they once were, when deft squirrels trustingly took sugar from them. Now I’m here. And everything is as he’d remembered: the yellow forsythia, the poplars’ shady…
I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…
As the work of Rosanna Warren reminds us, to be a poet is to be a writer of poems. The forces of abstraction that threaten always to turn real individual artworks into mere manifestations of moods or (worse) theories or (worst of all) institutions—these forces go limp before poems so brilliantly made. The sculptures are…
Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets that live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe. You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail….
Broken tulip, 17th-century Holland The plain white petal between her finger and thumb belled into a sail pregnant with nothing it could bear, then split, dark seamed, its length. A whole fleet foundered in the field around her: bands of white tulips, red and yellow, diluted to shadow beneath a setting moon splinted against the…
Because we wanted things the way they were in our minds’ black eyes we waited. The beaver raising ripples in a vee behind his head the thing we wanted. A weed is what might grow where you don’t want it; a dahlia could be a weed, or love, or other notions. The heart can’t choose…
Drunk off his can and pissed at the ruse of another day, backache a bum rap and woodpile shrunk to kindling, the old man stood at the kitchen sink and stared out at his neighbor’s cow. What a filthy beast, he thought. What a stinking, cud-chewing, gas-spewing waste of a field. And then, because what…
after Lena Cronqvist Whose girls are these, Lena, yours, mine, ours, everyone’s? So many deny them (Oh, no, not more of those!) Often your sister Sometimes another girl Always your parents (For me dark is normal) Is it conceivable your parents or my own actually could have done anything deserving of how the girls treat…
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