Born near the Cape Verde Islands, Hurricane Irma swished
her skirts of winds & rain, toyed with Puerto Rico,
stole light from 1,000,000 Puerto Ricans, her eye
on Florida. Some say she roared past like a train
they say it’s because they are hard to predict
and even harder to forget
their naming ceremony broadcasted over live feeds, satellite images
insisting she settles on the tongues of both faithful and atheist
By AMY LAWLESS and JEFF ALESSANDRELLI
The way the godly Jupiter paints them,
each butterfly comes to life
upon his brushing of the canvas,
inanimate specter becoming animate
By JOHN MURILLO
Not sleepwalking, but waking still,
with my hand on a gun, and the gun
in a mouth, and the mouth
on the face of a man on his knees.
Autumn of ’89, and I’m standing
in a section 8 apartment parking lot,
pistol cocked, and staring down
at this man, then up into the mug
of an old woman staring, watering
the single sad flower to the left
of her stoop, the flower also staring,
He looked to be in his early 60s: compact build, a designer baseball cap tight on his head, beard close-cropped, clutching a smartphone in his right hand. It was eight in the morning, we were in line at Whole Foods, and the guy was wearing sunglasses.
21 de septiembre de 2017: “pero estamos vivos”
One: home
Two: home dos tres dos tres two: Mother.
One lápiz. One pen. One ocean between us. Six: Home.
By MARA PASTOR
Translated by MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ
This island is full of women
who come back the way
skeletons return with the surge
or turtles to their native shore.
And after we officially gained entry into the Brotherhood of Bad Motherfuckers, what could our mothers do but lose sleep, wake into prayer, prepare herbs & apples, cursive the names of our enemies on loose leaf, & let their names dust in the sunlight.
Now everything is clean, rezoned & paved, tenements abandoned like whack parties, what is left for us to do but summon bullies from their graves & liberate ourselves from influence.
A flash of light—
out of the corner of my eye.
Fireflies, the thought flicks on—and dies.
Outside, the night air slaps my face
like a sheet of ice. Tufts of grass
crackle underfoot, porcupines
crawling up my spine.
The power goes out at night.
The house grows colder, its walls
begin to shiver, and we, its organs,
organize. My little son arrives
at my bedside, breathless,
in an inflatable boat.
We go to the window and search for signs.
Disorder everywhere: suitcases
strewn all over lawns, baby carriages
spilling bottles and toys, towers
of books toppling in the driveways. But the sky’s
perfectly ordered, still. In my chest I grope
for a moral law. And I find—
beating powerfully—a starfish.
Oksana Maksymchuk‘s writing has appeared in Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, Los Angeles Review of Books,New Orleans Review, Salamander, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She won first place in the 2004 Richmond Lattimore and 2014 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender translation competitions and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, she co-edited the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Maksymchuk teaches philosophy at the University of Arkansas.
By TINA CANE
Lucid dreaming is not a job but a steady occupation
I do not have a big dream they are only little dreams
and right now I cannot think of one
My father read the paper while my mother scrubbed the floor
I pay a woman $100 a week to help me keep my house clean
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Celebrating 15 Years