By ALDO AMPARÁN
Is he a saguaro burning in the desert’s shadow—or a sidewinder’s tracks on sand—
Have I left footprints in the snow of his dreaming—
And if you have no coins or skyscraper,
then parachute from your mind into blossom,
Left untrained,
the bitter melon’s taken over
the mulberry, dusting it
Even if the sky collapses, there will be a hole in it.
Korean proverb
Our cat died before the towers fell.
I’m writing this from lockdown on a day
when the dogwood throws out its dose
of darker pink. The schoolyard
for the black women who died for motherhood
how long has my womb ached
to carry half of my laugh gently
New work from our contributors: ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA, DAVID LEHMAN, and MATT DONOVAN.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra | “The Walk”
David Lehman | “Just a Couple of Mugs”
Matt Donovan | “Portrait of America as a Philadelphia Derringer Abraham Lincoln Assassination Box Set Replica”
The Walk
By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
In a tree hollow like a cave mouth,
in which you and your partner
selfied yourselves, is a trash bag
oozing trash juice.
New poems from our contributors JORDAN HONEYBLUE, ROBERT WOOD LYNN, BENJAMIN PALOFF, and LYNNE THOMPSON.
Table of Contents:
Jordan Honeyblue | free it.
Robert Wood Lynn | Peepers in February
Benjamin Paloff | Of Vanity
Lynne Thompson | Paradise: 579
Unincorporated Arapahoe County, Colorado
Through mantle, earth, gender, air
through false stories and true
undistracted by pectin, pucker, time
scale, sugar, seed, dripped rainbow of
oil, prism, crushed berry residue,
om of home, acid, oxygen song—
I grip jelly jars to my eyes
mock binocular my way to You—
Poems by TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
Translated from the Slovenian by BRIAN HENRY
Translator’s Note
Both of the Tomaž Šalamun poems in this feature come from books published in the early 1970s: “On the border” first appeared in Amerika (1972), and “Trieste” first appeared in Arena (1973). “On the border” demonstrates Šalamun’s newfound engagement with the United States (he was a fellow at Iowa’s International Writing Program from 1971 to 1972), while “Trieste” is set in a city that Šalamun knew well since it is about ten miles from his hometown of Koper.
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