By ALBERTO DE LACERDA
Translated by MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO
To John McEwan
The architecture of the sleeves—
White—
As she composes her response
To a letter
(On the marble floor
The seal
Jumps
From the crumpled letter)
By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
Kol Nidre
And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.
The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions, that denouement when I too was a spinning child & my head tripped down its irreversible path into the solid corner of the piano bench. No signs of slowing down nor do I mention how, playing ghost & turning beneath the sheet, I felt like a cannonball, I felt like nothing else speeding through darkness & then through the fog near the rocky shore. Afterwards, I knew only gravity, my blood, the irrefutable bleeding.
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.
I’ve never been content with less than
God. Visions
like interior castles:
a red and white blanket
over grass, broken
slabs of tile, folded denim
in a fishing boat, sand-gold
grains of rice, all the colors
that tint a bruise—
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.
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,
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