Article

  • Two Seals

    translated by Martha Collins and the author Are they Julio and Carmen? Or José and Magreta? Are they from Ethiopia, or Tanzania? From the Congo, or somewhere else? On the beach under the moonlight They lie side by side Like two exhausted seals Thrown from the sea by storm waves. Their black skin glistens in…

  • Komi

    translated by Phil Metres This drilling rig lies in the forest tundra. One rises on command, sleeps ears cocked, and waits for the cry “All hands on deck!” at an untimely hour, mindless of the weather. It snows here—but it’s summer in the States, and I’m free to conceive in futile ways what you eat…

  • Alba: Innocence

    Sunday. The bells, as expected. I cannot help it if I rise, if finding the room too fraught with light—all of it, the white walls, the rinsed notion (always almost inside then just out of reach) of God, your body gleaming in sleep where the sun falls on it and away from, falls on and…

  • The River Woman’s Son

    for Margaret At the edge of a river and the end of a road, a blue-eyed boy lived with his mother and five sisters. The women sewed wedding gowns for every girl from every town. But not one of the river woman’s daughters made a dress for herself. They were too plain, too fat, too…

  • Again, The River

    for Geneviève Pastre Early summer in what I hope is “midlife,” and the sunlight makes me its own suggestions when I take my indolence to the river and breathe the breeze in. Years, here, seem to blend into one another. Houseboats, tugs, and barges don’t change complexion drastically (warts, wrinkles) until gestalt-shift dissolves the difference….

  • Ti Kikit

    Ti Kikit puts on some pink lipstick, stands on the Place Saint-Pierrein Pétionville. For this evening she has borrowed a friend’s plastic barrettes, eleven of them, each pinching a spongy braid at its base, dotting her head with pink. She likes that corner of the ChoucouneHotel—white bougainvilleas overflow from behind the walls, make her feel…

  • Westbound

    First a startle of fragrances to remind me where I am: turf smoke blown through drizzle, oystery brine-tang over Quay Street. An umbrella-raking gale. Then mind-blowing blue above the town for a nanosecond       until my airport-bound rented windscreen               spatters with the weather’s wet           splash of anticipation and by an astral lope I’m…