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Two Poems by Manuel Vilas “Vampire Apprentice” and “Stockholm” Translated from Spanish by John Yohe
Vampire Apprentice
(La Caleta, Cádiz)I don’t remember anything anymore, and I am gratefully alone.
I like to walk along the beach with an ice-cream in hand, a Magnum,
white chocolate, sometimes I think of myself as a benevolent vampire,
indignant about the strict morals of proud subterraneans,
and I slip into the beach movie theatre, and watch whatever,
and when I leave I drink a lemonade and watch the stars on the sea
and think that the actor in the movie who played Pablo Neruda
was more handsome and taller than the real Neruda, -
Two Poems by Immanuel Mifsud “The Beginning of December” and “Behind Your Door” Translated from the Maltese by Ruth Ward
THE BEGINNING OF DECEMBER
I dream
of sleeping in tepid water
as I did many winters ago;
of a hot bath,
of afternoons,
nights
of lovemaking in water,
of sleep,
of shapes emergent from liquid;
of the dark,
of silence,
myself and water:
water and myself
becoming one.
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Self-Addressing: A Bilinguacultural Poem by Yuan Changming
In English, the speaker always uses
A proper pronoun to address self
In Chinese, the speaker calls self
More than one hundred different names
In E, there is a distinction between
The subject and object case of self
In C, there is no change in writing
Be it a subject or an object
In E, the writer spells self with one
Single straight capitalized letter
In C,
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As Jay DeFeo Paints by Lenore Myers
“Land of Plenty” by Vera Illiatova
Deathrose – The White Rose – The Rose (1958-1966)
1
Did your daily attention to paint
its weight
its hue in changing light
its sculptural bulges
its chasms
make your painting more
like words?
2
I start in the figure
as you never did
although the surface was of immediate concern
you started in the thing
itself
Paintbrush between your teeth
3
What defines the figure
Who says what ground
The art of FUNK
The surface all fucked up
or
The process of fucking up
into revelation
4
You break it the
surface
never lies
right with you
5
By weight,
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Roots by Benjamin Balthaser
You pull the turnip from the black,
almost frozen ground and show me
the roots, still unshrouding from
their wet tangle of soil. They startle,
these dense webs, they aren’t
tentacles or long spindly arms — the roots
feather forth, ghostly, like the white fans
of fish at the bottom of oceans. Ever since
your new job out on the oil fields,
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This is Not a Photo of My Mom By Lindsay Lee Wallace
This is Not A Photo of My Mom
By Lindsay Lee Wallace
My mom Debbie would have been 67 today. I’m eating scrambled eggs in a green vinyl booth, listening to a little girl across the linoleum count down the minutes until she turns eight while sparkly letters sway on springs atop her festive headband and wish the entire diner a Happy Birthday. She encircles her trove of blueberry silver dollar pancakes with her arms, protecting them from the greedy hands of the other kids packed into her booth and declaring,
