Nidia Hernández: Miami Book Fair 2016 (Spanish and English versions)
a poet and a tree
are always interchangeable
Ma Yongbo: Father’s Little Boat (English and Chinese)
She sits beside him all night,
watching the Father’s darkness,
listening to the careful breath of the dark,
listening to the broken winds of another world.
Jane C. Miller: Two Poems
What’s ahead
horses see only
by degrees, the way love ends,
no one touching in the dark.
Lawrence Wray: Stonehouse Alms
There is in me a traipsing line of ragged men
I can’t ignore. Grass stalks dangle from chinks
in the house’s mortar by the caged window.
Michelle Bitting: Sudden
I wanted to come home transformed
and be surprised by the flickering
in our radically impermanent
robes
Nicanor Parra: There is a happy day / Hay un día feliz
I went wandering this afternoon
The lonely streets of my village
Accompanied by the good twilight
Which is the only friend I have left.
Elizabeth Bishop: Insomnia
By the Universe deserted,
she’d tell it to go to hell,
and she’d find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Voice of America
The Voice of America got us to Karachi. Damascus. Islamabad. Dhaka. We went everywhere thanks to the Voice of America. Sat in circles on wooden floors, wore white flower garlands on beaches. Spent birthdays beneath mosquito nets. Rode in rickshaws. Stirred curries. Made friends. Loners. Social butterflies. A monkey climbed through a window in south India to lift the lid of a pot.
Robert Cording: Reading Poems with David
Over the phone, David begins to read
and Mary, in old age, in a nursing home,
returns to life in David’s voice, voicing
her words, her questioning
of her own bafflement
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Empathy
In the long long bliss of the breastfeeding years, I belonged to that rocking chair where sun filtered through the window and the leaves of the summer pomegranate shifted slowly in the hot June air.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Leaving It There
I stop weeding, stand still a while, hands on hips,
because it’s back again — that feeling of elation
tangled with grief.
Jianqing Zheng: The Overlook
I embrace two rivers, the Changjiang and the Mississippi, each taking a share of my tributary for thirty-four years. Life is a river. The migration from East to West is a way of releasing the self for a confluence of places and allowing the rivers to flow through me and form a shoal of belonging.
Rachel Hadas: Why Trump’s rage defies historical and literary comparisons
As he has gained fame and power, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his appetite for vengeance appear to have sharpened.
Kathleen O’Toole: Migrations
On exiting “Warmth of Other Suns” at the Phillips Collection, 2020
