TWO POEMS by Kuhu Joshi
Saraswati on a Sunday morning
All this living alone. This mug
With my initials on it, scrubbed
And put to dry
On the kitchen slab. It waits for me.
Looks happiest when filled up.
I’m a bit sick of Maria – my
Areca palm
There by the bookshelf. She
Dances. When it gets like this I
Don’t know what to do with myself.
Fridge then bed then a book.
Laundry helps. I end up feeling useful.
Now when Brahma comes
I let him. More new books?
He always picks one off the shelf.
On good days
He reads the blurb and
Sits down. Otherwise it’s the bed straight.
Highlights of a cricket match
On his cell phone. Come
Let’s listen to a song.
I want to sleep.
Evening
How can I describe what I’m unable to praise?
The birds are chirping in the low berry bush.
I don’t know who they are, they don’t know my name. An ambulance,
a siren, the emergency ward I’ve have identified just in case,
sitting at a marbled coffee table, marigolds in a vase. Green, leafy,
dying. God – I like to pretend you’re watching.
In this case, you are a man. It makes sense – I’m lonely.
The earth is not speaking back. The baby cries
in its pram. The mother rocks the pram, hushing,
making her teeth large and shiny. The father smiles at me.
On the bridge, people are carried
in the body of a train, nodding like peonies.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE CORNFIELDS by Carolina Hotchandani
Audio Player
I am a citizen of a former British colony that rebelled from England with a great tea party, declaring itself its motherland one day. America. Was it orphaned? Did it kill its own mother? Poor England. Where are you from? the other Americans ask me. My mother is Brazilian; my father is Indian. I was born in Brazil, but I’ve been here a long while. Here where? Here here. Here, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Rhode Island, a year abroad in England, then California, Iowa, Texas again, then a year in South Korea, then Chicago, then another “South,” but this time South Dakota, which isn’t in this country’s South at all. Now Nebraska. Here here, where the cornfields stretch from the highway to the horizon. Here here, where corn is fed to cattle who don’t graze. Hear, hear! as they shout in the House of Commons, to affirm the speaker’s thoughts. Hear, hear! to the English that seems foreign. Hear, hear! to the rustle of corn that doesn’t belong here. Hear, hear! to the language I use to build this block of words, which you may not hear at all, if you are quiet, if you follow the lines with your eyes, unspeaking, like mine, as they trace the rows of corn in the fields. Fed to the cows that Indians know as holy. Fed to the cows the Americans know as beef. I will become your cornfields, striped, farmed, not native at all, but everywhere, everywhere. |
TWO POEMS by Daniele Pantano
CORRUPTED (WASTEWATER)
We ask to be made too
. . .
short and bleeding to be
. . .
strangled with candy floss
. . .
to taste what it takes
. . .
to reach another to be absolutely
. . .
nothing but spoken about
. . .
to spell innocence or renewal
. . .
to know it’s always been there
. . .
that time is short and to expect nothing
. . .
to say how the window is a stranger
. . .
once more to know that the end
. . .
of water is a flood.
THE POET’S POET (WRITING & REWRITING THE FINAL LINE)
Every blanket’s worth a voice. In the end.
. . .
The bandages suggest torture. Or execution.
. . .
The ambition to grasp the totality of existence.
. . .
The lies of despair and consolidation. The sublime.
. . .
The harvest view you’re so ashamed of. Clouds.
. . .
The desolation above you. Nothing else.
. . .
The child walks by a mirror tired of being one of many.
. . .
The diaphanous wax and pigments. Speech.
. . .
The mark of an individual – an ambitious solo.
. . .
You never see the grass crawl near the flames.
INVITATION TO END by Faris Kuseyri trans. Patrick Sykes
A woman puts an orange in her husband’s pocket
and her longing I saw
they’re opening unmarked graves with warrants
and silence’s strength I saw
truth bound, the papers lie
and hate in the words I saw
grace in the bazaar, conscience in exile
and the feigned surprise I saw
driven again to my pencil’s mercy
and the invitation to end I saw
from poison mouths the children kissing the vine
and their glass bravery I saw
Patrick Sykes is a journalist and writer based in Istanbul, Turkey.
- Published in ISSUE 27, Poetry, Translation
from YOU by Chantal Neveu trans. Erín Moure
first his breathing then his pupils
I watch his mouth
its furrows its swells
slight circle of his irises
the black hole a tube
he sees me
impulsion
an implicit programmatics
ascension
the facades the borough
remanence of Rio
a yard a garden
the staircase
winding
its gradations
compelling
the maples
alongside
the false acacias
figuration of caresses
swirled rumour of a fountain
faint sound
metallic taste of the city
a magnetism
from palate to nostrils
infra-resonance
warm silver
low table
the flakes of fish
air under the studio ceiling
a loge
we make acquaintance
summer solstice alters the sky
we deflect curiosity by foreseeing questions
private
spheres
spontaneous revelation
the ineffable
freshness of a stream
are we already naked
bared
we expose ourselves
fluidity
gravity
propensity
the charm
the intimacy
premise of a banquet
Hephaistos
Aristophanes
vestiges dionysiae vertiges
Empedocles
happiness
tenor of futures put to the test
at ease
we name
great loves
inflections
decades
les fidélités
promises made
offenses injuries miracles
the enduring friendships
gaie santé
current genealogy
virtual group portrait
numerous
already
he stands up
draughts
the bamboo imbibe their fill of rainwater
transfer of delectation
euphoria
temptation reparation
congruency
catalysis
paradoxical privilege
incursion
permissiveness
we draw close
to kiss
convergence
Erín Moure is a poet and poetry translator. Most recently: Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021) from Galician, and Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (which won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for translation from French and the Nelson Ball Prize). A new book of poetry, Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké, has just been published by House of Anansi. https://erinmoure.mystrikingly.com Photo Credit: E. Sampedrin
- Published in ISSUE 27, Translation
- 1
- 2