Poetry

The toll of living voices like irregular bellsin the domes of concentrically arranged bricksin the dark roof causes the fish to fight.Their long gray bodies, eager for blindness,slide over each other in the umber shallows:they are like pigeons in a long-buried piazza;they break the surface of having been forgottenthe way the historically dead break the…

The sky brighter than before; rushes and salt flats; white, broad-winged birds that landed standing, like angels, who are known by all to be salt-eaters.     In that silence he set out water and bread and salt. He burned myrtle and hyssop. He wept. He called the quarters.     Raw rice and a…

        Najiba Ahmad and Fatima Muhammad Amin Everything began to end that winter. Inch by inch we withdrew, stopped at Kanitu, prepared for the caves— baking bread, boiling meat, sorting through clothes. Then someone screamed: “They’re coming.” We left the bread on the saj tray, the meat on the kerosene heater, the…

The one you have finished examiningis my son. That is the milky colored Kurdishsuit his father tailored for him, the blue shirthis uncle gave to him. Your findings provethat it is him—he was a tall fifteen-year-old,was left-handed, had broken a rib. I know she too has been looking for her sonbut you have to tell…

        Badria Saeed Khidir and Ayshe Maghdid Mahmud Bombs could fall anywhere, any time of the day. They were a nuisance we got used to. In our dug-out shelters we felt safe, until that haunting winter twilight when the muffled explosions deceived us. We came out thinking we’d survived the bombs but…

And Satan said unto the Lord, “You have your work             and I have mine, but there is no sin the world cannot hold,” and the Lord, he laughed himself a big one,             and said, “Satan, my friend, you are a sucker beyond all Tootsie Pops, for I will raise up a storm             that will take…

         for Mark Tredinnick, in north Cornwall For each turn off a main-er           road onto a minor, each place                     less signed, more inside itself (the turned back           of a corrugated shed,                     its roof weighted with tires, three milk churns on their concrete shelf) you could believe you’re one step closer to the…

This is not a small poem about loss or disappointment. This is a runnel with no use for a bridge, a curtain wall with no dead load, a road with no bend to my door. This is a forest with no trees. This cannot be foreseen. This is me, opening my mother’s spool box, taking…

Because something as broken and hurt as this should never be put on show, we buried it. No blight of sun nor weight of soil nor bleach of rain, we thought, would ever let it thrive. But given a month or so, somehow it shouldered back into the light. One seed head, sallow, awned, pitted…