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FOUR WAY REVIEW

THROUGH THE LAKE, THROUGH THE WATER by Johannes Anyuru trans. Brad Harmon

Tuesday, 11 April 2023 by Johannes Anyuru trans. Brad Harmon

THROUGH THE LAKE, THROUGH THE WATER


The beeches stand there, imposing, untouched,
steeped in time: I wander
through the tall yellow hall of leaves
and listen to the open
chords: October, whoever cries here
cries inwards,
the wood bridge has sucked the salve dry.
The underworldly bamboo flutes resound

through the lake, through the water, the wind is
lead poured into stone molds.

I happen to end up
on that strip of beach
where you and I made love one summer day
in the short dry grass.
There’s a you in every poem,
a courage or a great fear, there are
constellations carved out right here, 
spokes of blue in the eye of the migratory birds, the words
you laughingly taught me to pronounce.
And the Black Portuguese
spoken in Mozambique
is still the softest language
I know.
To my ears, all your words sound round and powerful,
like our “love”
or “freedom.”

Days when I
stand with my eyes closed
and feel around. As if by a hard
kick, as if by a caress.
Your short, light-blue summer dress
fluttering away through the burning foliage.
The weather changes sex. The dark lake
solidifies.





Brad Harmon is a writer, translator and scholar of Scandinavian and German literature. His work has appeared in journals such as Astra, Chicago Review, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Firmament, Plume, and Poetry. In 2021, he was invited to attend the Översättargruvan translation workshop and in 2022, he was an ALTA Emerging Translator fellow. He lives in Baltimore, where he’s a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University.

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry, Translation
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THREE POEMS by Sandra Moussempès trans. Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy

Tuesday, 11 April 2023 by Sandra Moussempès trans. Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy

NON-IDENTIFIED FEMININE OBJECTS 

 

Cinematic princesses escaping from an Eastward facing convent have long known the limits of where they can go 

Fatigued from hours of forest walking, they have taken refuge in a haunted house, abandoned since 1972, they now know that at any moment the story could stop 

The film could disintegrate, and they will go back to their well-to-do families in Beverly Hills or to one of the luxurious, seaside subdivisions of Santa Monica 

For the moment they chew their wild strawberry bubble gum, listen to Dubstep while wiggling in the bronze corridor, lying on old mattresses spread out over the hard dusty floor 

Corn flakes caked on the kitchen table since 1972, the box is draped in spider webs, the advertisements hold the faded colors of the time 

We sense something vaporous in the atmosphere, ectoplasms searching for their story, bodies trying to infiltrate other bodies 

We do not know what is being woven here, any explanation would be incomplete in light of the breadth of the invisible debates, the voice-overs intermingle: 

Where are the memories of which you have no memory?

 

 

 

CINDY SYNDROME (SUPPORT GROUP NEARING EXTINCTION OF VOICES)

 

Cindy

 I’m happy you’ve suggested I be you at first I took it for a vampirization of energy (a modern day masquerade) like an Ali Baba’s cave full of cement receiving its notifications by way of jackhammer but you are not one of those passive aggressive people no one remembers I already possess your voice one day I’ll have access to the kingdom of Olympus through a phonetic wing 

 

Cindy 

Her tessitura is currently frozen in the Museum of famous voices after staying in an empty box, a tape recorder from 1972, those machines that look like safes whose inaudible cassettes I’ve kept (I remember the thin magnetic strips I would rewind with my index finger), between the forward and advance buttons we can sense the acceleration of time, “noise reduction” becomes back to the future 

 

Cindy 

I presented the thing to myself like that, Cindy spluttering over the translation of another Cindy with a softer voice (Cindy 2 cloned during a marathon of ectoplasms where her paranormal friends met) Cindy in two copies with one small difference that one righter of wrongs and the other ethereal singer had the idea of making a shapeless cake that looked like Cindy 2 we will never know if she force-fed it to disconcerted geese or begged for crumbs of it by the front door 

 

Cindy 

It is good to flee condescendence at midnight in glass slippers even if the road is muddy I didn’t force anything side B mixed with precepts and pills from another side A metallic serves as my eyelet lace for king size needles, sewing up an exorcist doll into sound and rags will do

 

Cindy 

Cinderella in her original cardboard box slides up under the fifth wheel of the carriage is upset she mis-steered her project this new definition of the ambiance surrounding the name Cindy amputated by two syllables paper-knife in her mouth reborn before midnight of her cinders is an oracle in immersion please provide the upkeep notice to move up in her heart when the little ghost girl curses the packaging inside herself she must be provided in addition to the survival kit with an expression like on the sly 

 

Cindy 

These flowers hung on the back of the waterlily I could plant them out with bluebells my story lends to it half-witch half-sparkling orangeade with a bronze-colored stamp that vacuum-packs you but being there to spread the fire of banalities when poem erupts something other than this other thing that you would like to remember

 

Cindy 

It’s me again too intense before the mirror of dolls drenched with hope they all fit into the frame they search for their reflections in vain we call a princess grown old a queen of carnage well under every relation does not look her age and the mirror turns into a paragraph

 

 

 

WRITING TIME (AND ON THE EXPRESSION “TO TURN THE PAGE”)

Here is the little girl folded over like a page

You open her you undress her you take her with you

You feed her with a fork you slice her 

Lengthwise

 

You entrust her with a page she spreads herself out and wraps herself up with the page 

You crush her by closing the book

In theory she is not dead yet she unfolds herself with words

 

The house of liquid sentences is her main address

A ray of light fastens itself more to the houses/voices than to the invertebrate subjects

Like an eel the little girl lets go of a cry but retrieves it

 

It’s poetry reduced to black powder then reworked in living dough with a little water

Each pause in a given universe gives off a mystical odor

That we extract without tweezers from a temple above time

 

I became aware of it – I did not become aware of it –

In sinking my heart like a fork into a fixed memory

In sucking up the features of the guests present during the final scene

 

Carrie Chappell is the author of Loving Tallulah Bankhead (Paris Heretics 2022) and Quarantine Daybook (Bottlecap Press 2021). Some of her recent individual poems have been published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Nashville Review, Redivider, SWIMM, and Yemassee, and her essays have previously appeared in DIAGRAM, Fanzine, New Delta Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, The Rupture, and Xavier Review. Each spring, she curates Verse of April. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop and is Instructor of English at Sorbonne Panthéon University.

Amanda Murphy is an Associate Professor in English and Translation Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a translator living in Paris. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle and is a member of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Comparatistes (CERC). Her doctoral dissertation on multilingual, experimental writing, “Écrire, lire, traduire entre les langues: défis et pratiques de la poétique multilingue”, will be published in 2023 by Classiques Garnier.

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry, Translation
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ANCIENT MOSQUE by Xiao Shui trans. Judith Huang

Tuesday, 11 April 2023 by Xiao Shui trans. Judith Huang

Slightly tipsy, walking out of Hongbin Tower. Two hearses appear

on the bike lane. The invisible corpse, shut in a hand-pushed metal box covered

with black brocade, jingles, bangs and clatters, squeezing through the onrush of head-spinning traffic. 

Tightly-packed pedestrians scatter loosely in the smog, all eyeing him, intent on helping him find an opening.

 

 

Judith Huang (錫影) is an Australian-based Singaporean author, Rosetta Award-winning translator, musician, serial-arts-collective-founder, Web 1.0 entrepreneur and VR creator. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019, is the story of a young girl who turns to VR to create her own universe, but when this leads to an actual big bang in the Utopia Machine in a secret government lab, opening portals to the multiverse, she loses everything – and must go on the run with only her wits and her mysterious online friend, “Isaac,” to help her. Can she save her worlds and herself? You can see more of Judith’s work at www.judithhuang.com

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry, Translation
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TWO POEMS by Julia Thacker

Tuesday, 11 April 2023 by Julia Thacker
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Thacker-Julia_reading_The_Winter_Comb_2023.mp3

 

Aubade


My ghosts line up, mouths full of bitter 

greens and sweet grasses, 

names chalked on the walls                                     

of ruined buildings, the night

smelling of their breath. 

One wears a split lip, 

saxophone-blown. Sometimes he calls                 

in sick. I am not your splendid harness.

Don’t wait up. What is sleep anyway. 

Barnyard animals, goats and owls sleep. 

Even the earth with its seeds and vegetables 

rooting underground can rest. 

The joists of the house squeak. 

Like stuttering bells, pipes gurgle 

all night. Frost sets a breakfast table.  

Butter and milk, clatter of copper.

Watering can from which I wish

to be poured. What can I do 

but honor the first silver 

hair in the winter comb.

 

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Thacker-Julia_reading_Mysoulwearsacrown_2023-1.mp3


My soul wears a crown of milk thistle and woolly-heads

 

Sometimes she is buried at sea,
wrapped in linen, the waves like mouths 
of glass. Sometimes she rises again.

Mollusk-pearled, she strolls the village 
dripping kelp. Called Pink Star, 
Himalayan, Celtic, Diamond of the Dead 

Sea, she does not answer to those names.  
No hymn, no pilgrimage, no wafer 
on the tongue. She eschews hallelujah. 

Refusenik of frankincense and myrrh.
Sometimes she claims she’s just off the boat, 
amnesiac. Takes the name Augusta Agnes.

Washes her unmentionables
at the sink. Bleaches her mustache.
Vagrant Sundays spent rolling in hay, tan,

sun-warm, indistinguishable from dry grass.
No bathing costume, swims in her drawers. 
Wades in cranberry bogs. Eats tomatoes off the vine.

Sleeps on the beach. Sand makes a dune of her body.
At church bazaars, she filches Chesterfields
and barters for lace mantillas. Disappears for days. 

Ignores my pleading letters penned in blackberry ink.
Neighbors say I should keep her on a leash.                    
She restoreth. She maketh still. She doth thirst.

 

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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JUNCTURE LOSS by Liane Tyrrel

Tuesday, 11 April 2023 by Liane Tyrrel
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Tyrrel-Liane-Juncture-Loss.m4a

 

Tiny words, real but illegible. 

The dog finds a small dead body and nuzzles it with her nose. 

Sometimes the petals of moon flowers tear as they open. 

A linguistic change is called a juncture loss. 

And here you’ll have to use your imagination because I’m not sure. 

Back then we grew mock orange in the yard. 

At first I didn’t think I would continue. 

Everything including the walls had been stripped bare. 

We say exact whereabouts when we really want to know. 

I was carrying it in a wagon and bringing it back home with me. 

I had visions of log runners driving logs down rivers. 

Gravity affects us and we age. 

I know I use too much honey in my tea. 

Trust is an arrangement. 

Who decides light?

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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FABLE IN WHICH YOU ARE A BARN ANIMAL AND I AM A CARNIVORE by Hannah Marshall

Tuesday, 11 April 2023 by Hannah Marshall
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Marshall-Fable.wav


Suppose
, you say, it began with the chickens,
the way one wing raised 
could unbalance,
the way they learned
to tilt their heads 
in a concession to gravity, all at once.

Yes! I like it, I say.
The pleasure of synchronicity.
The pigs, being dominant
in cognition, would be next.
They might listen to the rain
and learn rhythm
from the downspout.

Music, it seemed to you,
would be a matter of curled tail
and the scent of hay.
The cows would sing, without 
meaning to. 

I am entranced now: And the dark star
on the forehead of a pregnant heifer
would pulse, and she would moan
the river into the valley. 

You think this lovely, but obtuse.
You say, All night long, the fireflies
make love to the mist,

and in the morning, 
I interrupt,
the fox carries the music away,
warm between her jaws.

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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WHEN BILLIE HOLIDAY SANG by Grace Kwan

Monday, 10 April 2023 by Grace Kwan

I’m gonna love you like 
nobody’s loved you 
with the rain flickering 
against my parted window
and the sheets pooled 
around my hips was when 
I felt the first note 
at the bottom of my stomach
that suggested it wasn’t 
the bottom and there was more 
mystery to fall through
than I could imagine 
perhaps less the bottom 
of my stomach than 
the precipice of my stomach
and my first thought was 
to reach for your wrist.

It occurred to me after
the party that things like 
walking out of a party 
with someone you just met 
holding hands along a moonlight 
river was an inaccessible romance 
vignetted by searchlights 
chased by people 
I didn’t understand
with no hope of 
participating in desire
until Billie Holiday 
sang that note.

Everything I have is yours
you’re a part of me
what is it about her 
voice that cleaves 
the octave like an ocean?
my destiny so ardently split?
I think I understand
how you “love 
music” without interrogation
as to genre or poetics
or school of thought
just the experience 
of living from note to note
each breath lasting only as long 
as it sustains the next.

 

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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ELEPHANT by Julien Strong

Monday, 10 April 2023 by Julien Strong

Something so heavy with meaning
all we can do     is drag 

our hands across the surface

itching to define to fix
as a compass point
                              navigating what 

I thought I understood

because I lived within its skin
and yet
                              stroking the trunk
                              fingering a fold 

I understand nothing

not even the shape
                              let alone the name 

even the tracks it leaves in its wake

keep changing
                              and look 

in each depression

the falling rain
                              becomes sea

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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TWO POEMS by Tana Jean Welch

Monday, 10 April 2023 by Tana Jean Welch
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Welch-Sleeping-with-Jane.m4a


S
LEEPING WITH JANE

Again I mutate as we move through
the old park, ready to launch 
past the spectral-fired flowers, 
past the Japanese elm sighing
alongside the swarm of Jizo statues,
bald little monks tall as wine bottles,
each transmitting a silent symphony 
of grief—Jizo, protector of unborn babies. 
Jizo, an army of stone guardians 
stalwart in cardinal colored caps
and bibs—I rise above the remains

of my never known, not a phoenix,
but a woman without memory, not
a man on his endless knee to the night,
but a woman with a woman living in one
minute you undressed me and led me 
into the pond and despite the angst of algae
between my toes I knew I was safe, like 
a child who lives no longer, a child smuggled 
into the afterlife in the sleeves of Jizo’s robe.

 

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Welch-Jane-Complains.m4a


J
ANE COMPLAINS

about losing wall space to Zina and Heike,
she wants a new glory hole, maybe something on Post Street—

when she’s angry her voice is clanging
bangles over a thin arm, so I hear new glory hole instead 
of new gallery and wonder if it’s mine or hers 
that’s suddenly inadequate

but before the wrinkled page of the sky 
swells with emptiness,
I decide to let her know:

things can always go differently

Emma Bee Bernstein committed suicide 
inside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal.
She was 23. 

Where did she do it?
In front of Léger’s Men in the City
(purchased by Peggy the day Hitler invaded Normandy),
or next to Brancusi’s Bird in Space
(acquired as the Germans approached Paris),
or in the garden? Was Emma Bee
standing on the gravesite of Peggy’s 14 beloved Lhasa Apsos?

And how? 
                         I can’t find this information anywhere.

Jane asks: what does this have to do with anything?

everything (the last dog died in 1979) 

and nothing (her name was Cellida)

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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WHY HAVE CHILDREN WHEN THE WORLD IS ENDING by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Monday, 10 April 2023 by Julia Kolchinsky
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dasbach-Why-have-children-when-the-world-is-ending_.mp3


Killer whales have stopped reproducing. 
Polar bears are eating their cubs. 

Koalas abandon their young. Breathless,
nose low to the brush to keep

from choking on rising smoke,
they run towards the thousands,

pounds of food we airdropped
where earth stopped burning or

flames just hadn’t reached yet,
guilt for our part in this end

or fear it would come for us
the same. We tell ourselves

everything just wants to survive.

Believe in life as circle, not line.
In Karma, if it means our endurance.

We spread stories about wombats
herding animals into their burrows,

kangaroos hugging their rescuers,
or foxes feeding baby bears

uncharred, canidae milk. But animals
know to rely on no one. Their own

scathed hides and carcasses pile
the roadsides along bus routes

to the local preschool. The children
we chose to have must fight

gagging at the smell. My infant 
daughter screams at us 

for plunging the bulb syringe
deep into her nostril. 

She exhales snot mixed 
with my milk, screams

again, then sleeps. 
She doesn’t know

we’ve made this quiet 
possible. She turns her head away 

where breathing comes easiest 
and reaches for a warm body 

as soon as she can smell it close.
She doesn’t know the coral reefs

are dead and sargassum reeks
in mounds along Caribbean coastline,

starfish suffocated under its spreading. 
And maybe this is why

we’ve made her. Because 
she doesn’t know survival

is in our hands, forgives us 
their indiscretions, and lets us 

hold her body as though 
it were a world 

we could still save.   

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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TWO POEMS by Sebastian Merrill

Monday, 10 April 2023 by Sebastian Merrill
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Inverse-twin-lost-sister.m4a


inverse twin, lost sister

I.

              Like our dead, you live in memory:

our grandmother’s clouded eyes 
              saw you instead of me. In the cold, 
                            my bones still ache along your long-healed 

                                          fractures. I’ve spent years distancing myself
                            from you, but here, in our grandparents’ home, 
              I want to pull you close. When the spring 

snows melted, I left my apartment in the city, 
              headed north through twisting back roads
                            over mountains, stopped to pee, squatting

                                         
behind bushes, until finally I arrived here, 
                            on this Maine island. The cottage still 
              overlooks the rocky coast. Every dawn, 

I paddle through the wind-whipped waves
              of the Thread of Life ledges, those jagged 
                            rocks the seals love. I find wonder 

                                          even in the swirls of floating plastic: 
                            deflated balloons, grocery bags, forlorn 
              shoes. Do you remember the summers 

we spent here? The swimming lessons 
              in the frigid water, the sea stars 
                            in the tidal pools? 

                                          My grief for our grandparents 
                            has grown without you. Also,  
              all the sea stars have disappeared. 

 

II.

              Where do we converge,

                                          overlay each other

                            like a poorly developed film,

                            our two images a blur of light and form?

                                          Where and when

                                                        do we divide? 


III.

Every Sunday I pierce my thigh 
              with the silver fish of a needle. 

                            Is this what separates me 
                                          from you? 

              I inject testosterone synthesized in a laboratory, 
                            made from soybean and yams. 

                            Like magic, it’s difficult to believe 
                                          this exhilaration of hair 

                                          on my face and chest 
                                          comes from plants. 

                            When I thief myself out,
              I am halted by mirrors: this beard

                                          that grows miraculous 
                                                        and strange. 

 

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Persephone-am-I-the-pomegranate-and-you-the-seed_-.m4a

Persephone, am I the pomegranate and you the seed?  


I have no answers. 
I possess a tongue, maps,
night. Am I an arrow

from hell? An impossible
bending spoon? Estranged
in this new knowledge 

of the earth and the starless 
rivers that run beneath, 
I can no longer return

to how I was before.
You swear that without me,
winter. But did I choose to hide

the sun from the sky? 
Frozen, the ground cracks
with questions. I am still

tossing, pulled between two 
worlds. It’s hard to believe 
this same sun still rises even

after we were ripped apart.

 

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT UNSONNET by Dante Di Stefano

Monday, 10 April 2023 by Dante Di Stefano
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Land-Acknowledgment-Unsonnet.m4a


I am thankful for the acres in the inches
a poem makes on the page of its saying.
Like in this one, there is a large meadow
with a long table in the middle of it,
and seated at the table, every friend
and ancestor I could ever invoke
turns their faces to me and mouths the words
of a pop song from thirty years ago.

I am thankful that this image does not
unmake itself in a cloyed nostalgia.
Instead, I turn to you, my dear reader,
and say apple and flannel and snow
falling on the trees cut down to produce
parchment and draft and fraudulent treaty.

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  • Published in ISSUE 26, Poetry
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