The banana plant that thrashed outside my lover’s window
seemed unreal. Our hours together felt like a dream:
how he nudged a spider up the shower tile
By BILL COTTER
“I knew this guy once, called Andre,” Gary said, striking a strike-anywhere match on the zipper of his fly. He lit a Salem and buried the match in a clay flowerpot at his end of his porch step. He looked at me, not for permission to continue, but as though he were inviting me to dare him not to.
“Andre,” I said, kind of liking the feel of the name on my teeth.
By RICK BAROT
| I was jump-starting the car, having asked a stranger to hook up their car to mine. I was worried about her biopsy. Then I was talking to him about his new jacket, his awful landlord, his blinding headaches. He told me about left-isolate construction in sentences. I was writing, the work of it like a pilgrim’s progress conducted on one’s knees. Because the nights were so hot, I was unable to sleep. I was laughing because he insisted on building his own bookcases, painting them cantaloupe-orange. I was helping her clear out the backyard of junk. I was with her by the river. I was thinking of him, the taste of smoke on his lips. In the dusk, he showed me the lighthouse. I was often wondering where he was, day after day, the baseball cap that had to be taken off him to lean into his face. I was listening to the small dogs barking and making noise like small kids. I myself was being brought to heel. |
Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,
body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;
shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned
I do not like what you’ve done to yourself—
predictable theatre of struggle
I’m in the wings
of
world
Instead take this
translucent
pisces-glyph bug:
Its antennae flitting to test
the space just in front of its face
It struts right into a recluse web
A lesson in what distracts from pain:
Say pinching my wrist
while a fish hook’s mined from my foot
leaving an open-pit bull’s-eye
that never heals closed
What distracts from another’s:
A brick wall collapses
and takes down another in pixels
Names next to “laborer” and “child” replaced
by 2S4 Tyulpan heavy mortar
Now the poplared river
that Tatars were bussed over
is redrawn by kamikaze drones
And below
a wine cave in Crimea has its bottles
scooped out
Melon-ball divots
and cobwebs left—
this basilica of dust I watch the vintner pray in
Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Chicago Review. Recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Emory University Rose Library Fellowship, he lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.
By MARYAM DAJANI
Translated by ADDIE LEAK
I’m leaving Abdoun after having sushi at Noodasia, heading toward Airport Road. The traffic light in front of me turns red, and all I have to do is step on the brakes… but where are the brakes? Are they on the right, or is that the gas? I’m getting closer to the light, cars are stacking up in front of me, what do I do? Is the pedal on the right or left?!
I wake up.
My car: a room of my own with glass walls open to the world. One that makes me feel free and independent, when, in truth, I’m public property.
Driving isn’t my time for reflection anymore. Ever since I started using GPS for everything—even finding the shortest route to places I know well—I’ve gotten too busy trying to shave a minute or two off the drive to think. Too busy following the blue line.
When taking a visual field test
to map the areas you cannot see,
you need to keep your gaze fixed
on the screen’s central point
so when lights flash on the periphery
your eye will not just anticipate
and follow the quick programmed glints
you click on like someone playing
a video game—“chasing the light”
in order to get a higher score,
instead of learning where
the blind spots in your vision are.
Half-blind in one eye
and riddled with dead-zones
in the other, you see now
that you have spent most of your life
searching each human encounter
for random flashes of romance,
never admitting the limits
of your vision—the need to keep your gaze
fixed on the person at the center,
to remain patient, waiting in the dark,
for the horizon to light up
as if suddenly before you.
Kevin O’Connor is an editor of One on a Side: An Evening with Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost, and his poems and reviews have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review Online, James Joyce Quarterly, and other publications. He is faculty emeritus at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
By ERICA DAWSON
and hypersexual and drunk and, how
should I say, easy, when we share a kiss
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM
When Did Life Flip Upside Down and Make Us Walk on the Ceiling?
I asked him, “Where are we?”
He said the name, then became preoccupied with finding batteries for his portable radio with one hand, and with the other clutching me so that the crowds would not sweep me away.
“What does that mean?” I pressed.
By RICK BAROT
| In the park we stopped and looked up at the high branch where the ferruginous hawk ate another winged thing, the torn feathers drifting down. The hawk made a noise, like a little lever of pleasure giving way inside. I thought of the question the choreographer asked her gathered dancers: What do you do in order to be loved? It was as though I’d been holding my breath the whole day, walking beside you. A strong spring light struck us. Next to you on the ground, your shadow looked like crumpled black paper. |
Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
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