By BOB HICOK
Everyone should be given a bucket of roaches
and a bucket of air, one for company, one to pay the bills.
Be made to clean a grease trap for a year
with his or her fingers, with his or her nose
infected for life.
By MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM NAWAYA
Translated by ROBIN MOGER
Seige
I sprinted towards them as they battered away. Tried, but could not open the bolted door. I shouted out, called at the top of my voice for those around me to help, but to no avail. And when at last I despaired, and turned my back to come away, my head knocked against the wall of a water tank, greater still, shut fast against me.
By FERREIRA GULLAR
Translated by ILAN STAVANS and TAL GOLDFAJN
Just as two and two are four
I know life is worth the pain
Though the bread is precious
And the freedom, rare
By RAW’A SUNBUL
Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE
Absent Butterflies
She takes off her clothes and covers her chilly, naked body with a heavyweight green gown. She steps into the white plastic slippers and gets up onto the birthing chair. She leans back, gulping hungrily at the air and mumbling a plea for help in the form of the Quranic ayahs she’s been told will ease the pain of her contractions: “When the earth is leveled out, casts out its contents, and becomes empty… casts out its contents and becomes empty… casts out….” Her words are silenced by a new contraction slamming into her from behind, then bursting out from the middle of her back and wrapping its monstrous arms around her, engulfing her, linking its hands under her belly and squeezing, clamping down, pushing down, down, down. She bites her bottom lip and clasps her hands over her chest. She digs the nails of her right hand hard into her left palm, streaming sweat, a tear escaping the corner of her eye.
Twice winter nearly killed me. Once, the night before the Blizzard of ’77, when Faddie kicked me out the house. I left and went to the gas station, where I worked and where I knew a car was parked in the garage, so there I could spend a night or two. After, you know, breaking in, I turned the ignition, ran a hose from the exhaust out underneath the door, so I could, for the night, have some heat.
By TYREE DAYE
What did I know of skylines,
of a sea of brown faces not in a field,
but walking down Lenox Avenue?
Breaching beyond
the break wall, opening
the open sea like a long polished wound,
baffling the wind
with a force mustered from currents
where free is
two things—
unfathomable as the drowned book,
barnacled as if born and raised
between Aphrodite and the devil’s thumb
a whale heaves out a whale-tail
flaunting sunken love at the sunned earth
Nothing is analogous to God.
In order to strike, a cobra also needs
to recoil. When it comes to vice
and juridical proceedings, I abstain.
All good things, and strokes of bad luck,
happen in threes, and so let it be this way
with us: from lust, to neutrality, to disgust.
The swimming pool is empty—another one is full but cracked and there are leaves floating in it. I’m sitting with my grandfather. He’s blind and our point of contact is a limit bolts of recognition pass through.
He saw me once in a pool under the water so he sees this in his mind often when he’s near me. He tells me about swimming across a river. Where is this river? I see branches with blue-black berries on them sinking into the water, each berry so loaded with his memory and my imagination they burst with their own reality.
By BOB HICOK
I meant to be taller,
I tell my tailor, who tells my teller,
who cashes my check all in ones
to suit the height of my ambition.
And kinder, I tell my trainer,
who trains my tailor and my teller too
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