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…
Translated from the Belarusian by Hanif Abdurraqib and Valzhyna Mort Grandnanas, great grandmamas, great great grandparents, transparent, fairy, dressed in earth fluff, puffing into their palms, they perch on my ears and tweet: Here’s your field. Here’s your calendar. Sow, girl! I’m so for it. I farm. But in my field grow only…
All the people at once slip by unseen between your fingers in the silence that distance makes They are all there exhaling their gases in the company of plants inhaling theirs The mad roots scramble after water, soil and sun Some holes open as insects speak to the leaves
In the end I was not made for this; I have none of the pragmatic agnosticism of those who carry words, words, words, and yet return to themselves with joy and gladness. I am drowning in words, in clauses— in their present selves, the future promise and their haunting history; they stay with me unless…
Today I walked with two poets through a small forest. The bugs kept yelling questions. When I tried to answer, they denied asking me the questions. The air is so wet here that it only knows how to touch my lips assertively. The bugs are loudest behind me. They sound like fractions of pain, like…
And aren’t we all always jonesing for a way out or in, a better deal, a shorter distance to x, more y. Satisfaction is a shallow goal, counterfeit, but reassuring as a binky. Will Durant took credit for the maxim I stole for my title, but he stole it from Aristotle. We steal a lot….
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