In this month’s poetry feature, ZACK STRAIT talks with RICHARD SIKEN about influences, confrontation, readers, accountability, sacrifice, balance, surface beauty, deep meaning, writing, and Waffle House.
By CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Translated by WENDY CALL & WHITNEY DEVOS
Poems appear below in English, and Spanish and Tutunakú, the original languages.
Translators’ Note
Poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez creates her work bilingually, in Spanish—the language in which she was educated—and in Tutunakú—the language in which she was raised. Tutunakú is the home language of approximately 220,000 people in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. It has multiple variants and Lucas Juárez seeks out speakers from different communities to expand her poetic vocabulary.
She generally begins writing in Tutunakú, but lines also come to her in Spanish, so she moves back and forth between the two versions of each poem, creating the bilingual pair simultaneously. “It’s two creation processes happening at the same time,” she says. Tutunakú is agglutinative, so it contains words up to a dozen syllables long that translate as whole phrases or sentences in Spanish. Her translation process must be “letter by letter, not word by word, because each word contains so much,” she explains. Tutunakú is also a highly metaphorical language: “being pregnant” translates to “I am not alone,” while “I miss you” translates literally as “My stomach is sinking.”
Although poetry is a regular part of Tutunakú cultural life, Lucas Juárez is the first woman to publish a book of poetry in the language. These poems are drawn from her 2021 debut collection, Xlaktsuman papa’ / Las hijas del Luno. The title, “Daughters of Luno,” uses the masculine version of the Spanish word for moon (luna). Luno is the metaphorical father of Tutunakú women.
We began co-translating “Daughters of Luno” in 2023, inspired by the depth of Lucas Juárez’ poetic voice, written when Lucas Juárez was in her early twenties. To create our English translations, we worked primarily from the Spanish, observing and listening to the Tutunakú versions, though neither of us has formally studied the language. We met with the poet in person and via video call, and also exchanged many messages. We are grateful for her patience, generosity, and linguistic expertise, all of which have been crucial to our process.
— Wendy Call & Whitney Devos
Table of Contents
“Litutunaaku” is the Tututnakú people’s name for themselves. The word translates as “people who belong to the culture of the three hearts,” referencing the brain (memory), the antomical heart (physical life), and the stomach (emotional experience). Together, these three interdependent “hearts” sustain Tutunakú “triple consciousness.” “Li,” the word’s first syllable, refers to a Tutunakú person’s homeplace—which is central to identity.
Poems by CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Having made both poetry and fiction contributions to TC, the multitalented Catherine-Esther Cowie returns to us this month with highlights from her debut poetry collection Heirloom, forthcoming from Carcanet Press on April 24, 2025.
Publisher’s Note
Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny, and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.
Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegize and celebrate her subjects.
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Raise the dead. The cross-stitched
face. Her eye-less eye. My long
longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered
hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments.
To exist at all. A comfort.
A gutting. String her up then,
figurine on the cot mobile.
And I am the restless infant transfixed.
Her full skirt, a plume of white feathers,
A Bedtime Prayer
We ate the fruit Lord,
boiled and buttered we ate.
Thought nothing of it.
It was pleasing to the eye.
Filled our mouths, our bellies.
It was the fruit of a breadfruit tree.
A tree as old as the first city.
How it grew taller than the house.
Those monstrous leaves.
Its roots echoing— cracks in the walls.
Its shadow falling through the back door, the corridor,
lengthening towards the front—
Ghost of our first father,
ghost begetting ghosts,
our lives thinned into his weakness,
his terror.
But we were fed, fed, fed.
*
Lord, you have cast us off,
left us to starve,
Sent that girl.
Girl born with a veiled face,
a caul, calling.
How did she find the axe?
She wouldn’t eat the fruit,
refused its sweetness,
weight of our father,
the first city.
Lord, she went down to the garden,
an axe flowering in her hand.
It was you Lord, the bouden blan
chirping in her ear.
What cruel instructions?
Didn’t we do your will,
kept a remembrance—
the tree,
our father,
we were hungry, Lord.
The tree fell into the house.
The War
St. Lucia, 194-
A disturbed hour, the sky loud
with the memory of assault.
But still, it’s Sunday, the trees shake
like shac-shacs in the breeze,
and the sea goes on and on
with its lullaby like it has never
given cover to the enemy.
It is Sunday,
and we go on with our lovemaking.
I refuse to hush, let my pleasure rise
against the weary tones
in the thin-walled rooms like ours,
it was yesterday, only yesterday,
another body washed ashore…
Forever and forever,
death our only guarantee.
Haven’t I died already,
years ago, on a kitchen floor,
under the weight of a different man,
my girlhood shot through,
I learnt the body as machine—
dead heart, dead pubis.
It is Sunday,
I teem with life like the flies
swarming the torpedoed ships
in the harbour.
Haunting
We frighten the children.
My hair ragged in red cloth,
I speak a language they don’t understand,
their ears tuned to English, tuned
to American cartoons.
And Leda, Gwanmanman Leda runs
cracks up the walls,
through the centre of our dinner plates.
It’s their own fault, you know,
they won’t stay in their rooms.
How she endures, endures,
Gwanmanman Leda. Leda.
Even after I married,
after she died, she endures.
Tanbou mwen.
Jab mwen.
But the children,
the children.
They stare.
Regard me strangely, sadly.
There will be no walk to the park today.
No jump rope high.
Only their rooms.
They will stay in their rooms.
Alé, alé. I chase.
They hide behind a wall. Spy.
I must clean my house like I cleaned Leda’s room.
Scrubbing. A form of memory.
A song. Trojan horse for my own blues.
Keeper of the madness.
The mad. Leda.
Mwen faché.
I was only a child,
only a child
made for play,
not the washing of soiled sheets,
of shit-stained walls,
of an old woman.
But the children,
how they stare.
Their blink-less eyes.
Pouty lips.
Why won’t they go into their rooms?
Leave me to Leda.
We are a pair.
She, because of her bad head.
Mal tèt. And I,
because I was a child.
Small. Piti.
Crushable.
Like a roach.
The mad and the little,
The mad and the little,
Give them a tickle,
Then a prickle.
Leda, stop your singing.
And I must stop this fool parade.
This arm muscling towards memory—
You’ve made it up,
Isn’t that what they said?
Mal tèt, bad head.
No one ever hit you. Mantè.
Isn’t that what they said?
But Leda, Leda,
my sweet Leda.
Mad monument.
Rogue memory.
But we must think of the children.
They cry for us, Mommy, Mommy.
Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St. Lucia to a Trinidadian father and a St. Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. Cowie is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.
New work from ELIZABETH METZGER, MATT W. MILLER, ANNIE SCHUMACHER, and MARC VINCENZ.
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This piece is excerpted from The Math of Saint Felix, a poetry collection by Diane Exavier ’09. Exavier will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
algebra
Retold by ILAN STAVANS
Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472) is the only pre-Hispanic Aztec poet we know by name. The word means “Hungry Coyote” in Nahuatl. But Nezahualcóyotl wasn’t solely a poet. He ruled the Texcocans, who, along with the city-states Tenochtitlán and Tlacopán, formed the magisterial Triple Alliance, which ruled from 1428 until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors almost a hundred years later. Nezahualcóyotl was also known for his philosophical meditations, his urban projects, especially aqueducts, and for his views on war, sacrifice, and the legal system.
By BRANDON SOM
This piece is excerpted from Brandon Som’s Tripas, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Som will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
ANTENNA
Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau’s Orpheus copies the
broadcasts from a netherworld for verses—
By JINJIN XU
These poems are excerpted from the published work of JinJin Xu ’17, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
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Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.
Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm.
Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.
Not
What Day
Heroic
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center.
By KRIKOR BELEDIAN
Translated by CHRISTOPHER MILLIS and TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN
Piece appears below in English and the original Armenian.
Translators’ Note
The pervasive sense of place in Krikor Beledian’s works was forged in the crucible of displacement. Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide that Armenians refer to as the Catastrophe.
The pre-eminent writer of Western Armenian literature, Beledian is a long-time resident of Paris, where he has authored more than 30 volumes, including poetry, a 10-volume novel cycle still in progress, literary criticism, experimental prose, and literary history. And he has done so in the UNESCO-designated “endangered” language of Western Armenian.
“Mantra 5” is one of the 32 extended poems collected in Mantras. Beledian says that Mantra 5 was written from the tip of the Seine isle of Vert Gallant, which looks toward the Louvre and the metallic bridge of Pont des Arts. From this vantage point, the poem brings into its sphere multiple and often contradictory threads which are simultaneously at play, resulting in a fractured surface. Time and geography are superimposed on each other; just as the ruins of Palmyra appear in the Louvre, the shadowy dead of indeterminate origin course through the currents of the Seine and the Euphrates. The poem is both atonal dirge and palimpsest.
In the Preface to Mantras, Beledian writes that “place is exile, and exile is the original catastrophe.” The challenge of translating Beledian’s writing is its radical tenuousness—of place, time, and language itself. This is a complex undertaking because Western Armenian belongs to a culture nearly obliterated in 1915, a Catastrophe bookended by centuries of displacement. English, particularly American English, belongs to the culture of conquest and certainty: How to render into English a poetic language which is acutely aware of its calamitous biography, its indeterminate attributes, and its mandate to give voice to the unspoken, unseen, unknown?
— Christopher Millis and Taline Voskeritchian
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