Translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco Seventeen years I’ve worked nights, circling aroundand guarding rivers, walking over riverbanksin uninhabited spaces heated by my breathbehind the stadium, on lumpy soccer soil,seventeen years in boundless air. It all beganwith resin boiling in some distant, vacant lots,among the shadows in military peacoats,with little rail…
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 hair growing in my sons’ scalps,…
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.We hold each other, for a moment,…
Translated by Ming Di He wanted to write a poem as he crosses the street.He wanted to write a poem as he trots throughthe crowd buying and selling Spring Festival couplets.It’s almost a poem, but up on the treetopsome partridges pop up, and they are shoutingthey are crying and shouting. They skip from one camphor…
Translated from the Belarusian by Hanif Abdurraqib and Valzhyna Mort Grandnanas, great grandmamas, great great grandparents,transparent, fairy, dressedin 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 onlyred grass,green grief,that reek of guilt and shame and gray…
All the people at onceslip by unseenbetween your fingersin the silencethat distance makesThey are all thereexhaling their gasesin the companyof plants inhaling theirsThe mad roots scrambleafter water, soil and sunSome holes openas insects speakto the leaves
In the end I was not made for this; I havenone of the pragmatic agnosticism of thosewho carry words, words, words, and yetreturn to themselves with joy and gladness.I am drowning in words, in clauses—in their present selves, the future promiseand their haunting history; they staywith me unless I destroy them, clearall memory. This is…
Today I walked with two poets through a small forest.The bugs kept yelling questions. When I tried toanswer, they denied asking me the questions. The air isso wet here that it only knows how to touch my lipsassertively. The bugs are loudest behind me. Theysound like fractions of pain, like Agnes’s tree, which isvisible because…
And aren’t we all always jonesing for a way outor in, a better deal, a shorter distance to x, morey. Satisfaction is a shallow goal, counterfeit, butreassuring as a binky. Will Durant took creditfor the maxim I stole for my title, but he stole itfrom Aristotle. We steal a lot. In 7th grade my friendPam…
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