Poetry

Ask her if she is cold. Ask her if she needs to hide. Fold her into a rectangle and slip her into your breast pocket. She will record the auditory data regarding the condition of the heart. Motherdreaming. Mother turning into sleep. Mother changing the channel. Mother turning underwater.   M mostly becomes sunflower head bending…

ghost: to die   ghost: to haunt   ghost: to disappear from all messaging   ghost: when sunlight bleaches a photograph   ghost: another walks out of a room but leaves a perfume   ghost: begin with the G guttural, the tongue lifts to hit the back palate, then the mouth rounds itself around the…

So that you feel the weight of your life, you   and the children you do not have   you and the children, you   and you and the children and you     So that your days may be lengthened and tightened by children   so that the days of your life may be…

Cool and spooky spillage of cloud at the horizon big vase of light and smoke big white bed sheet that got loose   slapping the landscape flat. For dinner there is fried pork, chili beans, spoon bread with butter or cream, potatoes fried with onions,   smoking hot. I put the fire out with buttermilk,…

Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton Macpherson   His late style is called baffling, a slap in the face for a public ardent as a pair of worn-out shoes.   But the music is tired of reconciliation and seeks refuge in his rage. Let it grind, let it chafe. As when existence contracts in…

Translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco   Seventeen years I’ve worked nights, circling around and guarding rivers, walking over riverbanks in uninhabited spaces heated by my breath behind the stadium, on lumpy soccer soil, seventeen years in boundless air. It all began with resin boiling in some distant, vacant lots, among…

It’s a spectacle how blood replicates us. When my sister opens her mouth to laugh,   she is my father or could be mistaken as so. Away from her familial tongue, the bloodline stretches   to her own daughter, familiar bone frames, façade, my mother’s eyes are also in my daughter’s face, my father’s  …

I draw you out, faint voice, from rippled pages: a famished angler reeling in a fish, the kind that, in the folktale, grants a wish— a golden thing, imbued with living magic.   Between us is the taut line of attention, imperiled by the current and the wind. Slowly but willfully, I reel you in….

Translated by Ming Di    He wanted to write a poem as he crosses the street. He wanted to write a poem as he trots through the crowd buying and selling Spring Festival couplets. It’s almost a poem, but up on the treetop some partridges pop up, and they are shouting they are crying and…