Poems by MARA PASTOR
Translations by MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ
Homage to the Navel
Navels end sometimes.
Before that happens,
the body draws a road
from the door
through which you will arrive
to the place of areolae
where you will calm your hunger.
Origin of anthill
of white light that from me
will return to you to teach us
that a navel ends
when another is
about to begin.
By TOM PAINE
While eating sardines because they swim for a shorter time in the dying oceans than larger fish and are thus less full of mercury and industrial cocktails (and also because they promote neuroplasticity with all their Omega-three fatty acids, and who doesn’t want to grow new neurons?), and while vigorously churning the sardines with a fork in the can so they didn’t look so suited and ready to swim, I spied a lunula of minute vertebrae dangling from my fork.
Why do you keep moving?
Because I’ve been given no other choice.
Why do you keep moving?
Because I don’t have the right passport.
With what do you cross borders?
A notebook, a hat, a picture of Jerusalem
and a poem in Aramaic.
By KRISTINA FAUST
Winner of the 2018 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.
The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.
By JOHN MURILLO
Whitewalls Mudflaps
Late night howling down
a dark dirt road Headlights
killed and so the world gone
black but for the two blunts
lit illuminating Jojo’s fake gold
grin One girl each screaming
from the backseat we raced
the red moon rawdogged
the stars
The rain had just finished saying, This block is mine.
The kind of rain where you could sleep through two breakthroughs and still have enough left to belly sing in the ambrosial hour.
Blood pellets in the dusk & dashes of hail were perfect for finding new stashes; that is to say, visitations were never announced.
A broken umbrella handle posed a question by the day care center.
We broke the law and into smiles.
We sowed dissent and daffodils.
We wiped our tears and private files.
We stacked the deck and dollar bills.
By JOANNA KLINK
What have you, in such indignation, become. Dusty—
a vaulted interior echoing with air, envy, blood.
Vanity’s steady hum. Each wrong done to you
a gate that opens forever into storm. Farewell to cobwebs
swept with water-lights. Farewell to children who smile off
into the distance.
In conversation with A Hill in the South Bronx, by Perla de Leon
Estoy buscando un árbol que me de sombra
Porque el que tengo me lo van a cortar
Coro de bomba
This building stands,
the last tree to be cut down
in a garden of brick and steel
made desert of rubble and dust.
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