They walk to the ocean, talk about all the relationships
that have fallen apart around them.
So many women they know pursued love
and risked their chance for children.
The sound her hand makes against his sleeve
is the sound of palm trees.
Indifference is far more efficient
than fission or fusion
as a weapon of mass destruction,
and far less problematic
than uranium or tritium
to procure, occurring,
as it does, massively in nature.
My dad could be tough and distant
and push a little too hard into what hurt
but if God pulled that Isaac shit on him,
saying “I want you to sacrifice your son
for me” it never would have got as far
as me strapped to some Moriah altar.
If I was nearby, he’d tell me to go inside.
Then, he’d resign, curtly quit, from God,
flick a Lucky at the old man’s feet, and
walk away. Later, I know he’d joke,
“That fucking guy? He couldn’t spell God
if you spotted him the G and the D,”
making me laugh even if behind his eyes
he was making peace with perdition.
Matt W. Miller is a poet, essayist, teacher, and author of Tender the River, The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus (winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry), and Cameo Diner. A former Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.
By ALBERTO DE LACERDA
Translated by MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO
To John McEwan
The architecture of the sleeves—
White—
As she composes her response
To a letter
(On the marble floor
The seal
Jumps
From the crumpled letter)
By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
Kol Nidre
And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.
The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions, that denouement when I too was a spinning child & my head tripped down its irreversible path into the solid corner of the piano bench. No signs of slowing down nor do I mention how, playing ghost & turning beneath the sheet, I felt like a cannonball, I felt like nothing else speeding through darkness & then through the fog near the rocky shore. Afterwards, I knew only gravity, my blood, the irrefutable bleeding.
My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul.
Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts.
As fires burn halfway around the world.
I’ve never been content with less than
God. Visions
like interior castles:
a red and white blanket
over grass, broken
slabs of tile, folded denim
in a fishing boat, sand-gold
grains of rice, all the colors
that tint a bruise—
By MARC VINCENZ
It seems all the light of morning
has descended here where it’s usually dark
and frogs raise their heads in the bulrushes,
where the last sounds swarm among the oaks.
for & after William Shakespeare
To your beached blessings, add this curse:
not making worse what glass makes
so clear but neither smoking the path
to your impaneled store, absconded
documents across your bathroom floor,
public security, national writ walled in
where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
glory and never break your bloated story,
without flourish, without wit,
everywhere the news grows: May you dwell
among cases evermore.
Anna Maria Hong’s books include Age of Glass and Fablesque and the novella H & G. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.
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