My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul.
Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts.
As fires burn halfway around the world.
By MARC VINCENZ
It seems all the light of morning
has descended here where it’s usually dark
and frogs raise their heads in the bulrushes,
where the last sounds swarm among the oaks.
for & after William Shakespeare
To your beached blessings, add this curse:
not making worse what glass makes
so clear but neither smoking the path
to your impaneled store, absconded
documents across your bathroom floor,
public security, national writ walled in
where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
glory and never break your bloated story,
without flourish, without wit,
everywhere the news grows: May you dwell
among cases evermore.
Anna Maria Hong’s books include Age of Glass and Fablesque and the novella H & G. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.
By VIKTOR NEBORAK
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
The rusty hollows inside the old mosquito
reduce his soprano to dust. Down the pipe
of his fragile beak, the pumps are already weak.
And his blood flows through fossilized riverbeds.
His gas tanks empty, song silenced, not a drop
of compassion in him… Running on coal fumes,
the rusted engines deliver him to drill
one last buzz through the ears of the crowd.
A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons
on these civilians as on military echelons
and then been posthumously awarded
the highest orders! his name on honor lists!
banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks!
… if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.
Viktor Neborak is a poet, writer, literary scholar, and critic. He is also a founding member (along with Yuri Andrukhovych and Oleksandr Irvanets) of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group. His collection The Flying Head and Other Poems appeared in English translation in 2005.
John Hennessy’s most recent books are Exit Garden State, a collection of poems, and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych co-translated with Ostap Kin.
Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. With John Hennessy, he translated Set Change by Yuri Andrukhovych, and A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan.
By LAUREN CAMP
What is it like to be found? All these years on, I’ve never before been
to the edge of this rocky square state. I drive 41 through aura and wither
and slip into Golden then out to Stanley and right on 60.
Beside the road, dust chafes and three shapes of mountains.
Keen winds fold in and exasperate. The radio sputters its beats.
Assigned to be at a school as the sun has left its felicity
to lead young grades in how to find and trust a poem, but I can’t
see the entrance apart from the fences. I cede to another end
while the sky stays to its razoring blue. I am late. I reimagine late.
And then I am taken, finally, into the gym, late and flummoxed.
I swallow. Set my eyes on 122 tender children, much smaller
than never-ending. At this age they are all swish and unconquerable
hope. A stunned mic waits like a nest below the fluorescents
and I am pointed to use it, to woo the kids into words. I go up—
to the empty middle of the gymnasium, put my teeth to the mesh
and invent a direction. I discard what I intended and ask
these little lighthouses to beam their vibrant lights to the page.
Beam what no one has asked them to find before. Where have you been
lost? They listen for rules but I give none. They tremble
with their little power. Say many lives lead nowhere. Say they huddle
within this town. Its pious blue. Say the verdict of future is here where
hawks skirl and transport. The children’s worries
are the thinnest lessons. There are stories they are moving toward.
Was it chance they had almost all been lost in Wal-Mart in the wipe-out
fluorescence and worshipped wings: Seasonal, Sewing, Tires,
the skittering intersections? Aisles, they ask me
to spell—and they write it, elongating the letters. The energy increases.
They shine as they explain the town’s slickest business as the world
of gone children. At last and thank goodness, they are lit up.
Telling the waves of fear. The breath wet. Their words nervous,
their sinews redefining. Life goes in a blink.
They were all clenched back to parents.
Without embellishment, they were saved.
Lauren Camp is the author of eight books, including In Old Sky, which grew from her experience as astronomer in residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She received a Dorset Prize and was an Arab American Book Award finalist. Camp served as poet laureate of New Mexico from 2022 to 2025. Visit LaurenCamp.com.
The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.
By ALLISON FUNK
in County Meath, Ireland
You must leave everything you’ve carried
to enter the tomb, says the guide
pointing to the passage grave
mounded with earth. From outside,
the tumulus all but obscures
death’s reach,
By ANNA MALIHON
Translated by OLENA JENNINGS
YLANG-YLANG
in the thick halo of insects, the lamp resembles
a mature dandelion
the girl as pale as bandages incessantly conjures spells
I can’t make out the words
I am still there where there is roaring and how…
…ling
unbridled nature has undone me thoroughly
I lay like a stunned fish in the lord’s hand
and a thought about water fills a warm sea
bordering the land’s illuminated wounds
that the worms, animals and feathered messengers
visited while searching for sustenance
and instead of my arm a bamboo shoot hangs out
gathering strength
and in my hand someone has placed
the globe of this complicated world
exhaling: live
I don’t have enough strength to close my eyes in shame
or scream get away from me, I’m alone
alone I’m alone, give me back my hand
how now to overcome the grand piano’s mouth of silence
and toss a baby up to the sun
the bamboo will only be good for a flute
but I lack enough breath even for that
a tall girl with a gaze like the Mother of God
murmurs seeds of words upon the tiles
the mocking moon peeks through a hole burnt
in the tulle: time to go
and now in the cottony silence, a yellow
melody of resurrection pushes its way through
like a ylang-ylang flower
and a damaged airplane like a lost petal
returns to the sky
and the little boy with my hands embroiders the collected sounds
I exhale so loudly that the dandelion’s
circle of insects dissipates
dawn…
[IT FELT LIKE BLOOD]
It felt like blood
on the floor of the subway car,
like sticky patterns of footprints—my new identity…
It felt like someone had turned me into
a bucket of strawberries,
and forgotten about it…
And the platform like a safe haven
and the—red beginnings of love—
between heart and throat.
I woke up as if no one was shooting,
only boys wander in
one stands nearby with a pistol,
and—bang-bang!—into the void…
But suddenly not just a crater—
But a black pit in the chest.
And tiny red droplets.
I am eating one strawberry—for the sick brother,
another, smaller one—for the son,
I am eating the slightly crushed one for him
who crushed my heart over the years.
And the last one—the biggest, the shiniest—
for my father who was never a father to me.
Put down your toy death.
Go, return the sun’s face
to the longest night for me.
Here are peonies and June,
and soldiers tightly standing.
And never,
never will anyone leave you again…
[THE POEMS BETWEEN US GREW SHORTER]
The poems between us grew shorter
until everything unwound into a single letter
with a period
which you turned on its head
because you liked exclamatory endings…
Finally, everything went quiet.
I became still as a white shell in the Paleozoic era.
I wish I hadn’t written words, biting my lip.
I wish I hadn’t written on the water with my fingertips.
I wish I hadn’t turned circles into a delicate zero…
You destroyed my Universe, flipped, abandoned
Forgot the address
Forgot the lanterns with flames in the window
Only letters
gnaw at memory
like mice gnaw at last year’s feed sack.
Short poems come with freedom for the blind.
Long poems come with a cage for those with sight.
Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is a translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, Yuliya Musakovska, and Anna Malihon. She lives in Queens, New York.
By PEDRO POITEVIN
Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV
I am myself a member of myself
and every time I search within I find
another me, mysteriously aligned,
and in that replica wherein I delve
there dwells another, and another yet,
ellipsis dots: a mammoth nesting doll
that both contains itself, containing all,
and self-inhabits, the set of all sets.
I am the madness of the grand design,
I am the limit of where reason goes,
I am the science behind metascience.
The endless universe of sets is mine,
and this includes the cheeky set of those
denying my existence in defiance.
Pedro Poitevin, a bilingual poet, translator, and mathematician originally from Guatemala, is the author of six books of poetry. His work has appeared in Rattle, River Styx, The Mathematical Intelligencer, and Nimrod, among other publications. In 2022, he received the Juana Goergen Poetry Prize, and in 2025, the Premio Internacional de Literatura Palindrómica Rever.
Philip Nikolayev is a poet living in Boston, raised in Moldova. He translates poetry from French, Romanian, Ukrainian, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. His collections include Monkey Time and Letters from Aldenderry. His collection of poems in Spanish translation by Willy Ramírez and Pedro Poitevin, Un poeta desde el balcón, has been published in Latin America.
Winner of the 2025 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
By CARSON WOLFE
The morning after I had woken to him
holding his flashlight beneath my bedsheets,
I told him I felt too sick to go to school.
It’s always confused me, why I chose
to stay in his house another full day,
waiting for my mother to finish work.
Like any other, we played chess
just like he’d taught me, and he let me win.
Something broken and unnameable
hanging between us—perhaps it is me,
writing this poem, watching myself
shrink as a ten-year-old, watching him
sacrifice another pawn. From this angle,
it occurs to me, after all these years,
that he knew I was going to tell.
And now I am afraid for that little girl.
How much easier it all could have been
had I tripped at the top of the stairs.
It must have crossed his mind
as those silent hours came to a close.
He didn’t reach over the gear stick
to rub my thigh on the drive home,
only stared out at the barriers
as we crossed Barton Bridge.
I always believed him
to be pathetic, a coward of a man,
but we pulled up outside my mum’s house
and he opened the door, let me out.
Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet and the grand prize winner of the 2025 DISQUIET International Literary Prize. Their work has appeared with Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, and Rattle, amongst others. Their new book Coin Laundry at Midnight is forthcoming with Button Poetry in spring 2026.
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