Poetry

The First Last Light in the Sky

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

That on the silent horizon, something
Not a sunrise rose, half itself and half
The horizon, dragging its bulk, its lights
And salts, from under shifting sheets of sea,
Leveling the sky into shallow moats
Of sounds, flecks of birds, beginning again
To believe all brief and sideways dreaming

Poetry Never Stops Defining and Redefining Its Terrain (English & Spanish)

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By LUIS MUÑOZ

POETRY NEVER STOPS DEFINING AND REDEFINING ITS TERRAIN

Poetry never stops defining and redefining its terrain. It has done so throughout history, since Aristotle, Cascales, or Antonio Minturno. But this task, which seems like a kind of prison sentence, is also a fountain of intensity, a force.

What Always Pulls at Me (English & Spanish)

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By LUIS MUÑOZ

WHAT ALWAYS PULLS AT ME

What always pulls at me, like a persistent hand tugging on my shirt sleeve or at my pant leg, is the poem I haven’t written. Hey, it asks me, when is it my turn?

The blank code of my unwritten poem is inflated with announcements of what it could be and swagger. Much more than a poem already written, where limitations have already ended up imposing themselves and where initial intentions end up lowering their head in embarrassment…

From Eidolon

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By SANDEEP PARMAR

I Went Sick as a Child

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ARSENY TARKOVSKY

Translated by VALZHYNA MORT

I went sick as a child

with hunger and fear. I’d rip the crust
of my lips—and lick my lips; I recall
the fresh and salty taste.
And I’m walking, I’m walking, walking,
I sit on the steps by the door, I bask,
I walk delirious, as if a rat catcher led me
by my nose into the river, I sit and bask
on the steps; I shiver this way and that.

Dante Or, The End of Poetry

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry

By PATRICK PRITCHETT

for Raul Zurita

And he stirred his coffee, the old poet, and spoke of
Dante, and how Homer’s journey to the underworld
wove a thread through Virgil to the selva oscura. And
that the Commedia was not the apex of Christianity, but
its finale. That the enormous architecture of the poem
was not built to house theology, but to protect man from
the absence of God, who had already departed.

Hellgrammite Cloud

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By GARY METRAS

A cloud drifting over the house tonight
is the shape of an insect, a hellgrammite,
large, long, and singular, crawling through
the waters of dark sky.

Postcolonial Chicken

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JOHN MATTHIAS

1. Texts

“When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit-roast.”

—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses