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I Don't Know a Thing
by
Ruy Belo. Translated by Alexis Levitin.
I know words by touch. Someone else in my place might say he’s a tamer of words. But only I—I and my brothers—know to what extent it is I who am tamed by them.
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by
Laurel Blossom
He made it at day care, the drawing
of the family going camping.
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by
Laurel Blossom
My daughter’s cleaning out the fridge:
suspect food a month, week, year or more
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by
Laurel Blossom
Fighting in a jungle jumble,
young man far from hearth or help
heard the enemy,
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by
Laurel Blossom
Rain pulls me from sleep
like a woman hauling buckets
from a wishing well, leaving the water
restless and unsettled.
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by
Laurel Blossom
Keep it short,
make it small
enough to fit
like a bit of cotton
sewn onto your heart.
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by
Charles Cantalupo
One down the dune
Over the beach
To the edge
Of the glassy ocean
To go in.
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by
Elizabeth J. Coleman
What lives only for a day? I asked,
and it answered: may-fly, cousin of
the dragonfly, naiad for a year before
it’s born, with a mere twenty-four
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by
Elizabeth J. Coleman
He and I have been fighting again in that dull way,
as we run down the subway’s filthy steps. On the N,
we’re squeezed close by the crowd. “I don’t understand
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by
Elizabeth J. Coleman
Vilma has an accent like my grandfather’s.
He and I watched Lassie Sunday nights until
the doctor said all that emotion was bad
for his heart. Sometimes I wonder about life
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by
Rachel Hadas
For, on behalf of, instead of, for the benefit of:
luminous datives floating on the air
conjure an emptiness. Someone can't
do something, isn't here, so we act for them.
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by
Rachel Hadas
Entering the chapel, people wave,
half-call, half-whisper to each other, mime
amazement, as if it were incongruous
to encounter colleagues
at a colleague's funeral.
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by
Rachel Hadas
Death-dedicated: that was how I saw you.
Not that you had yet lost all appetite
for earth earthly food.
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by Gyula Illyés. Translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott.
Where Tyranny is
there's Tyrann,
not only where the rifle gapes
not only behind prison gates,
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by Dezső Kosztolányi. Translated by Peter V. Czipott and John M. Ridland.
This song of mine's
a simple strain;
it sings of this:
it sings of pain.
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by Dezső Kosztolányi. Translated by Peter V. Czipott and John M. Ridland.
They gape in wonder and break out laughing,
they stare ahead, then look back; stall
and turn around in bewilderment:
they don’t yet understand it all.
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by Donald Kuspit
firmed by silence,
your
aloofness magnifies.
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by Donald Kuspit
make yourself
inseparable from yourself,
double your beauty
to make
it everlasting,
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by Donald Kuspit
all is not lost,
however lost you
look,
your uncombed hair
a budding
sun,
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by
Ana Minga. Translated by Alexis Levitin.
21
You existed when peaches were turning into stars
and madness was the material used by gnomes
to make a dream
23
Like the dead to their cemetery
like the sound of an accordion
they arrive in a rush
push us around
34
Nobody wants to carry a dead man
but today someone will have to do it
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by
John Ridland
A carpenter's
shim is a tapered
slim shape of
wood tapped
in with a
wooden
mallet
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translated by
John Ridland and Muriel Ridland
After Le Bonheur de ce Monde, by Christophe Plantin (1514-1589)
Having a house convenient, pretty, neat,
A garden where the espaliers smell sweet,
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translated by
John Ridland
After Rilke, “Herbsttag”
Lord: it’s enough! The enormous summer’s done.
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by
David Slavitt
If a Jew learns the tango, is he still
a Jew? Probably not an orthodox,
but the rest of us still share some disinclinations.
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