Poetry
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Nothing Stinks Like Lust in a Young Woman
art by Virgil Suárez
by Hajer Requiq
Nothing stinks like lust
in a young woman.
My cannibal heart is drunk
on its own blood.
For nearly thirty years,
it’s eaten nothing but shame.
Today, it sits in my chest
like a hump on a hunchback,
useless and heavy.
I am still teaching the tornados
in my body
to turn into summer breeze.
My last lover couldn’t make it
past my mouth.
My Cerberus tongue
howling and yowling
at the gate, -
Global Voices: A conversation with Iranian poet Ali Asadollahi
by LIT Translation Editor J.P. Apruzzese
Introduction
For more than two decades, Iranian poet, translator, and editor Ali Asadollahi has been quietly expanding the possibilities of contemporary Persian poetry. The author of six poetry collections, he has written across free verse, haiku, visual poetry, and other experimental forms, guided by a restless commitment to exploration rather than any single aesthetic program. Alongside his own work, he has devoted himself to translation, introducing contemporary world poetry to Persian readers while helping bring Persian literature into conversation with audiences beyond Iran.
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After the Rabbits
art by Virgil Suárez
by Lex Williams Page
A year passed before I finally noticed
the rabbits missing from the yard.After spring came & went & with it the grass
& the mowers & my duty to this earth—the question of the garden,
whether I would tend to it this year—& last summer’s strawberries nestled in beds
of cocoa mulch, budding again & needing new nets,all uneaten, when April arrived,
& even in June. -
A Review of Lara Chamoun’s debut chapbook “Bleeding Ghosts”
by Rebecca Endres
Lara Chamoun’s Bleeding Ghosts opens with the image of a scar, and thus begins one of the themes that will haunt the reader for the rest of the book. “It faded to a whisper after your first words squeezed through your throat, slimy and strangled” Chamoun writes.
Slimy and strangled indeed: the collection, written primarily in second person and featuring characters who would feel at home in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, displays again and again the difficulty of voicing things: hurt, elation,
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-5°
art by Trevor Cunnington
by Tashiana Seebeck
Let’s tear open the oil paint
sky in Mariposa where you first knuckled the loam
and said Let’s–
I am afraid to tell God your name lest
he look up at your spruce face and unmake
the tongue tip behind your teeth I’ve come
to know well. December looms and lingers for a lifetime.
The poppies know only hoar frost
and woodsmoke. A man in the shape
of your last lurched out from the doorway lacquered
shut with dust and all the longleaf pines shuttered closed. -
The Sundering
by Stephanie McCarley Dugger
A dove, waiting
in the elm outside the window,
calls. Every day
he searches for her,
listens for her reply. I thought
I would understand love by now.
But, I am featherless,
too careful, too
finely tuned
for touch.
Yesterday,
new buttercups lined the walk.
Today, they droop–
