It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols – which of course are manifold – symbols
of so much else? What’s amiss with simply the huddle
and glut of bees, with those fuzzed globes
by the hundred and the clipped out sky
beyond them and the leaves that are black
if you angle the sun directly behind them,
being themselves, for themselves?
Category Archives: books poetry lit
Poetry: ‘Being here’ by Vincent O’Sullivan
Poetry: Orange Grove by Beenish Ahmed
I want to tear a page from the book of alliterations.
To get lost in an orange grove where blossoms
abound but bear no fruit. Here, they are losing
their language, but remember enough
to know what’s been forgotten. Still the women speak it
to dishtowels and bathwater. Sweep bits of it off the floors
and call it dust. There is never anywhere that isn’t here.
I’ve learned that more times than I can count before now.
Before now became then. Before then
became us. Before us ever was. I’m told
there was a tree
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Poetry:The Days of August Leapt, One Over the Other
I learned these strangers and their families
wandering and returning.
We once outraced a hail storm pulling
the bleaching laundry off the southern terrace.
One day at table our older son surprised
himself in accidental fluency
by asking aqua per favore, might I.
-from “The Days of August Leapt, One Over the Other,” by Judith Baumel, Barrow Street
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Poetry: quarantine with abdelhalim hafez
the lyrics do not translate
arabic is all verbs for what stays
still in other languages
تصبح to morning what the
translation to awake cannot
honor cannot contain its rhyme with
تسبح to swim t to make
the night a body of water
i am here now & i cannot morning
i am twenty-three & always
sick small for my age & always
translating i cannot sleep
through the night
no language has given me the
rhyme between ocean &
wound that i know to be true
sometimes when the doctors
draw my useless blood i feel
the word at the tip of my tongue
halim sings أعرق a’raq
I am drowning i am drowning
the single word for all the water
in his throat does not translate
halim sings teach me to kill the
tear in its duct halim sings
i have no experience in love
nor have i a boat & i know he
cannot rest cannot swim
through the night
i am looking for a voice with
a wound in it a man who could
only have died by a form of
drowning let the song take
its time let the ocean close
back up
-Safia Elhillo, winner of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize
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In A Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed
In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed,
the mushroom scent lingers.
As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.
As a person who’s once loved completely,
a country once conquered,
does not release that stunned knowledge.
Jane Hirshfield, Writer’s Almanac
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How We Got Here Against the Constant Wheat
Hours repeat their work.
They bleach the evil blooms,
dust the field in tinder.
If there is a wind
tithing through the corn again,
they make it spirit,
measuring the seasonal reenactment
of how we got here
against the constant wheat.
Like distant trains,
the stars help us move closer
to what tiny faith
lurks within our breathing.
Migration’s old tambourines
wave beneath the singing.
Sitting on the porch,
I’ll believe anything:
that we are better than we are;
that we might find better ways
to want to be.
“The Field” by Christopher DeWeese, Atlas Review
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Poem: No System for Grief
You were in the world and. More
slowly now I am
so fasted now so. Long
it’s been without
you, if you ever read this
you were what. I was dreaming of
this welt, to know
it before. It comes like love
I loved your
empty spaces,
Kimberly Grey
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Checkpoint, Matveyev Kurgan
When her sister moved across the border
there was no border, not even a line
like the one they’d drawn in chalk
down the centre of their bedroom,
dividing walls and window, the light
parsed out between them
like a parent’s love. Only the door,
its point of entry and exit, was shared.
read more
Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Cura Mag
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Ghazal for Unforgetting
What was it he needed to read? There was a book on one
of the shelves. He only remembered the cover was green.
88 keys, 11 octaves. After daily exercises,
the lid came down on a felt runner of green.
The first year is paper, the eighth bronze, the twelfth
silk or linen; the sixteenth, a candlestick silvery-green.
What trees grew in front of our first house? One
shed only flame-colored leaves, the other green.
One arrow struck the girl, the other struck the god. He pursued her,
even as her feet grew roots, her arms leafed over with green.
Near the water, there used to be a house of quarantine. On a short
stretch of road, broken shells in the gravel amid tufts of green.
Should your mind quietly open that side door and leave, what
will you remember of us, of our days greener than green?
-Luisa A Igloria, Via Negativa
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Poetry: Sunset Park
The Chinese truck driver
throws the rope
like a lasso, with a practiced flick,
over the load:
where it hovers an instant,
then arcs like a willow
into the waiting,
gloved hand
of his brother.
What does it matter
that, sitting in traffic,
I glanced out the window
and found them that way?
So lean and sleek-muscled
in their sweat-stiffened t-shirts:
offloading the pallets
just so they can load up
again in the morning,
and so on,
and so forth
forever like that—
like Sisyphus
I might tell them
if I spoke Mandarin,
or had a Marlboro to offer,
or thought for a minute
they’d believe it
when I say that I know
how it feels
to break your own
back for a living.
Patrick Phillips
Coffee and Irony 