Poetry
-
Two Poems by Pietro Federico “New Jersey” and “West Virginia” Translated From the by Italian John Poch
photos by Giovanni Chiaramonte
WEST VIRGINIA
The shack is like a bone half-buried
in the forest of West Virginia.
The two of them live there married.
How black the pigment of their skin
and the hollows of their mouths.
The wrinkles at the corners of their eyes
radiate like wind-struck tears.
Their clarity the only thing clear.
Angels.
-
Tefillah Ne’ilah by Yael Hacohen
Ten days before Yom Kippur,
God’s night of forgiveness, it’s tradition
to ask it first of my kin.
My neighbors in the south
thirst on your lips lined with dust.
The homes you left in ‘48, I cemented shut
they stand like brick ghosts of the banished.
Our father wronged us both, Ismael.
But I have wronged you more.
Yael Hacohen is a Ph.D. -
Tap Me by Greg Allendorf
like a sugar maple. Break me in,
an oxblood boot; I want it to spurt.
I want tin buckets massy with serum.
I want you to see how, for me,
every raindrop’s a paranoid theorem;
a body bloats in every creek I walk.
There’s a train wreck every time (I think)
a bottle fly dies in Ohio. A fractured
family never formally resets.
-
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.
-
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,
