Halloween

Scene 1
Scarves fly
As if a tribe of ghosts carry them to the sky
They fly and land with sin on my neighbor’s head
My neighbor knows neither their names
Nor hers

Scene 2
Scarves run toward the angels
The angels are unusually black
It’s said to be a costume party
It’s said to be a cheerful consolation
Of the deceased who is in the well

Two ghosts are guarding the well

Scene 3
Shoes are set up on the wall according to the angels’ wishes
“Vanilla scented angels”
Shouts the shoe seller
Who was also selling the prayer to enter the ceremony

Scene 4
Who are you?
Satan said when he saw them coming out of the well
Who are we?
They said
When they slaughtered him

A Poet

When a poet dies
His arm goes to a rose he did not pick
The rose becomes pregnant with a word the poet coveted
Then she throws her newborn in the hand of another poet

When a poet dies
His eyes go to the tattoo of a woman in a remote nightclub
His eyes kiss the tattoo and throw their tears in this woman’s desire
The woman’s desire is now in the eye of another poet

When a poet dies
His head goes to a silver plate in Salome’s hand
Salome covers his head with seven handkerchiefs
And a pain borne by the head of another poet

When a poet dies
His feet go into the house of condolences
He drinks coffee and shakes hands with the mourners
While thinking he is at the funeral of another poet

When a poet dies
His chest goes to a war he much wished for
His chest drinks the stabs like an old wrestler, and he dies often
Because the one who writes his death is another poet

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Ghada Mourad holds a PhD in comparative literature with emphasis in translation studies from the University of California, Irvine. She translates from Arabic and French into English. Her translations have been published in Asymptote, Banipal, The Literary Review, Metamorphoses, Transference, A Gathering of the Tribes, English Pen, Denver Quarterly, Two Lines, Arablit, among others.

Sleep does not come for many nights. 
Today I waited for my unclosing eyes again
and sleep fell asleep first and sleep’s clothes and shoes
and door talisman went to sleep too
I alone lowered my gaze and watched sleep
who was sleeping without me.

Exhausted sleep collapsed beside me and curled its body
and snored ever so lightly.
Where is my sleep.
My sleep might be shuffling outside my door now and again 
before it returns to where it comes from
because I hear crumbling sand.
The fact that I am writing my poems when others are theirs
is really an embarrassment
my jolted poems making strange noises

and sleep will not come. Who sleeps my sleep
who won’t come to me.
Other’s sleep is sleep’s peace and
my sleep is sleep’s death and
other’s sleep is sleep’s dream and
my sleep is sleep’s reality and
my sleep for my sake
cried and cried where did it go.

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He currently teaches at Davidson College.

Once upon a time I left behind
The tribes of Buyeo and Suksin and Balhae and Yeojin and Yo and Geum
And Heungahnryeong and Eumsan and Amoowooreu and Soonggari
I betrayed the tiger the deer and the raccoon
And lied to the trout the catfish and the frog I left them behind

At the time
remember how the birch and the larch grieved
I have not forgotten the reed and the beewort pleading with me to stay
And how the Orochon tribe hunted a hog and held for me a departing feast
And how the Solon tribe followed me for ten miles and wept I have not forgotten

At the time
No sorrow or grief weighed me down I could beat them
I came lazily to the distant south
And under the warm sun I dressed in white and ate smooth food
And drank sweet spring and took midday naps

At nights I woke surprised by the distant howling of dogs
During days I bowed down to every passing person
But I did not know my shame

During that time the stone was broken and gold and silver were buried beneath earth
The crow too gave birth to a long line of lineage
And after all this when a new day rose once upon a time
I was chased down by sorrow and grief that I truly could not beat
And I returned to the old sky the land – back to my placenta 

But now the sun is old the moon is pale the wind is insane a wedge cloud
Alone soullessly floats around

O my ancestors my brothers my family my sweet neighbors my longing
My love my worship my pride my strength are no more
They have passed together with the winds and the waters and the years they are gone

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He currently teaches at Davidson College.

the mobilizing of the troops

coincided with the amassing 

of numerous migrating birds

only magpies crows and vultures

will winter here

sparrows titmouses finches

and the rest of the feathered ones

will seek the path to their salvation

some will become too attached to people

others will live in holes and shelters

in both cases

nobody again will call them

birds

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Katerina Stoykova is the author of several award-winning poetry books in English and Bulgarian, as well as the Senior Editor of Accents Publishing. Her latest book, Second Skin (ICU, 2018, Bulgarian) received the Vanya Konstantinova biannual national poetry award, as well as a grant from the European Commission’s program Creative Europe for translation and publication in English. Katerina acted in the lead roles for the independent feature films Proud Citizen and Fort Maria, both directed by Thom Southerland. Her poems have been translated into German, Spanish, Ukrainian, Bangla, Farsi, and a volume of her selected poems, translated into Arabic by acclaimed poet Khairi Hamdan, was published in Arabic from Dar Al Biruni press in 2022.

a poem
where I shatter self 
where I say no

*

no:
no offering
no trembling
no hands
no thirst
no telling
now more

*

no
no longer
this broken language

*

empty of you
these hands
dry pail

*

I am a silent river
for her to pass through 
and unknow her skin
on the water’s skin 
her body inscribed onto mine

*

you’ve left no space for your absence 
in these hands
nothing survives you

 

TRANSLATOR BIO: 

Layla Benitez-James is a 2022 NEA fellow in translation, a 2022/23 National Book Critics Circle Fellow, and the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode but He Had to Make Sure, selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem’s 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. As Director of Literary Outreach for the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid, she edited its poetry festival anthology, Desperate Literature. Poems and essays are published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Black Femme Collective, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latino Book Review, Poetry London, and forthcoming in Poetry Magazine. Layla received an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and has published reviews with Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

INCALCULABILITY 

Things and people often disappear at night, so in the morning you account for yourself with the help of your hand. See if you have incurred losses of yourself. There are ten toes on your feet, five in each flock. None should be missing from the herd. Your eyes are in your head, tucked in alone on each side of your face. Two knees, elbows and two clavicles. The twinless tongue lies in its burrow. One mouth, though cracked in half. Close it when you’re done counting. “I still have me” – affirm and write the result on a paper slip. Or admit: “I have lost my mind.”

 

 

CALCULATION

One is a human, alone under their skin. Ask the foreman what one means – he will point to himself. He also knows what two is: a sparrow’s wings, a pair of shoes, eyes. Human hands: a measure of duality hanging by the sides. Anything they both take at one time means two. Two has its own weight, can be grasped. Immediately after two begins a lot. Far too many: fingers, hair, years. It is difficult for the foreman to tell how much he has. So he does not count and remains incalculable.

 

 

ILLUSION

Apprentice: How is the illusion created?
Foreman: You employ word machines and kaleidoscopes. 
Apprentice: Is the item big?
Foreman: Not very, but stretchy.
Apprentice: What is it?
Foreman: Imaginary in the back of life. A box theater.
Apprentice: And the repertoire?
Foreman: Light. You can’t hear existential refrains. 
Apprentice: What else is not there?
Foreman: Death preliminaries. Just mirabilia, skullduggery of welfare.
Apprentice: Isn’t that a burden?
Foreman: Yes, because there’s no growth.
Apprentice: Why?
Foreman: It’s not real.
Apprentice: Who visits this place?
Foreman: The ones mistakenly in love.

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi is a translator. She earned her M.A. in English studies from the University of Lodz, Poland. She has translated various Polish poets into English, such as Miron Białoszewski, Justyna Bargielska, Bronka Nowicka, and Hanna Janczak. Recently, she co-translated Kim Yideum’s Hysteria into Polish. She also rendered Don Mee Choi’s poems into Polish in the collection Odmiany Łapania Tchu[Variants of Catching Breath]. Her newest translations of poems and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Circumference, Hunger Mountain Review, Sextant Review, Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tripwire, LIT, Berlin Quarterly, and Seedings. Photo Credit: Marta Zgrajka

what happens if i want to speak children
say beloved
embrace this solitude?

the signs will kill you, warn far-sighted voices,
the parallel paths of the law will kill you

many women have tried and failed
their names are the names of names

they come from everywhere
are written in every tongue
sing from every tribe of the species 

the voices say the only answer is giving up

the utopian solitude of the amazons
alone in a room

the perpetual battle of the wise woman turned to witch
and ash
or the scribe alone defending her parchment from the fire

old women sing the secret litany of their daughters

Sei Shōnagon
Murakami
Scheherezade, who obtained the prize of silence and love
by defeating predation with her song
Hypatia
Rosalinda
abbess von Bingen
the heretic monk Juana,
Teresa, Alfonsina, Pizarnik,
the strange Gabriela del Rocío,
María Luisa Bombal, Julia, Ángela

the list is long

giving-up, ever so small, the giving-up,

or you choose love, the tiny homeland of the house

or you choose the broad land of words.

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Seth Michelson is a poet, translator, and professor of poetry at Washington and Lee University, where he founded and directs the Center for Poetic Research. He has published 18 books of original poetry in English and in Spanish, poetry in translation, and the anthology Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention. His many honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lenfest Foundation, as well as prizes from Split This Rock, the International Book Awards, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the American Studies Association

They have grabbed me     opened up

cut loose     reshaped my nature

spared a cypher from being extinguished

begun a protracted illness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room tightened

brought my life sphere

one step closer to my body

underneath     was a blind area

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As if I voluntarily donated

my silent tissue to these violent 

cells    entrusted me as a mother ship

host animal    for endgames and destruction

 

 

 

 

 

 

The I function     non-sovereign in this drama

why talk about function     as if I

with language     could control      these whispering

crystal spores     mythological stalactites

without intent     or anthropomorphic characteristics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Melancholic pursuit of pleasure

eats up the time

I should spellbind     dusk

which always starts over

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If only     the magical organs

were here     capable of

placing me     in the orbit     that

refines all organic material

 

 

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry and criticism, most recently Summer (2022), and the translator of several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Kim Yideum, and, most recently, Eva Kristina Olsson’s The Angelgreen Sacrament (Black Square Editions, 2021). His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and abroad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). He is a professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and one of the editors of Action Books.