Alma Clark

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

Poems By G. C. WALDREP, ALLISON FUNK, and KEVIN O’CONNOR

Table of Contents:

  • G.C. Waldrep, “Below the Shoals, Glendale”
  • Allison Funk, “After Andrew Wyeth’s Snow Hill
  • Kevin O’Connor, “The Other Shoe”

 

Below the Shoals, Glendale
By G. C. Waldrep

I am listening to the slickened sound of the new
wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness.
It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks.
Mural of the natural, a complicity epic.
The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear—
Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage,

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors
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Little Women

By MEGAN TENNANT

1.

In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.  

Little Women
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The Window

By IMMA MONSÓ
Translated by MARLENA GITTLEMAN

 

Lisa

Morning after morning, Lisa would wake up with an easily achievable aspiration: to eat breakfast while contemplating the house at the bottom of the valley, which stood in the distance amidst the fog. When the fog started to fade, she could make out frost-covered shingles and smoke rising from the chimney. She could glimpse the narrow ribbon of water that divided the field behind the house, until it disappeared into the darkness of the impenetrable forest. And she could, above all, train her gaze on a hypnotizing point: the only lit window, the window of an attic room, a room Lisa guessed was a study.

The Window
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Iqra

Winner of the DISQUIET Prize for Poetry 
By IQRA KHAN

I begin as revelation. As explosion of glottal light against silence.
I am again asking for directions to the Haram, my ankles fluent in Arabic.

I am again asking for direction, ya Haram, my ankles flowing with Arabic!
Hagar, watch how God transforms this wilderness to civilization.

Iqra
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Against This Earth, We Knock

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.
 

By JINJIN XU

 

              I try to feel this is home 1

                                         I don’t think

                                I am a foreigner 2
                                             I was not supposed to be      living 3

Against This Earth, We Knock
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Woodpecker

By JEFFREY HARRISON

At first I thought the pileated woodpecker
that lifted up from the yard as we came home
from a walk in the woods, flapping
away on long black wings that curved
up at the tips and flashed white
underneath, might be a visitation

Woodpecker
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Morning Light

By JEMAL HUMED 
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

The piece appears below both in English and the original Arabic.

 

For the fighter Taha Mohammed Nur [1]

1

The hallway is cold and disquieting, lined with austere doors marked with consecutive numbers, giving no indication of their occupants.

The corridor is never-ending, leading to a room at its end whose grand entryway, formidable and rigid, seems to surveil the movement of the other doors.

He stood in front of it and straightened his service uniform. He took deep breaths, as if to expel the fear that had accumulated between his ribs on this particular morning inside the prison.

Morning Light
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