Dispatches

Churched

By JESS RICHARDS

image of heart on slate

Divided Heart: painting on slate, Jess Richards 2014.

 

Wellington, New Zealand

Stained light shines on breath-less angels
who occupy a stone heaven-on-earth without living for touch
without having felt another human enfolding them against soil.
Only the winged can lift themselves so high
but freeze half-way to the clouds
locked in cold bodies, solo-flight paused.

Churched
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Dispatches from MES FORETS/MY FORESTS by Hélène Dorion

Poems by HÉLÈNE DORION
Translated from the French by SUSANNA LANG

Poems appear below in both French and English.

 

forest

 

Québec Province, Canada

Les racines
fendent le sol
comme des éclairs

avancent dans leur solitude
et tremblent

pareilles à une vaste cité de bois
les racines
s’accordent à la sève
qui les fouille

observent-elles les nuages
pour apprendre
la langue de l’horizon

Dispatches from MES FORETS/MY FORESTS by Hélène Dorion
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Modest for a Dictator

By IRINA HRINOSCHI

opulent room 1

Bucharest, Romania

Spring Boulevard 50, in the heart of Bucharest’s former nomenklatura, currently bourgeois neighborhood, is where the former General Secretary’s one-story villa can be found. Împușcatu is what people sometimes call him around here, “the one who was shot,” or Ceașcă, “cup.” They were executed in winter: Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife Elena, who was also shot, but in people’s minds this was secondary to her being an insufferable pseudo-intellectual who loved fur coats. And their children, Nicu, Zoe and Valentin, spared during the 1989 Revolution.

Modest for a Dictator
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A Road, the Sun

By CAROLYN KUEBLER

 

white mailbox on the side of a road

 

Ashfield, Massachusetts

 

She remembers a road that she walked along. Something about joy, maybe, something about light. It was her own lightness, or maybe it was the road’s. She walked it more than once, that week in September, a year past. There were rock walls fringed with pale asters. Tiny white butterflies hovered in sunlight, and the hills were green. That’s all that remained. A year ago, and it has faded.

A Road, the Sun
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Two Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik

Poems by ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK

Translated from the Spanish by ILAN STAVANS

Image of shadows of a fern and other plants reflecting against the background of tree bark in golden hour sunlight.

Mexico City, Mexico

Translator’s Note

Translation is home. Whenever I travel, I seek it either by reading translations, or by translating as a grounding exercise. Lately I have been translating into English poems from Jewish Latin American poets, specifically works by conversos or those written in Yiddish and Ladino by immigrants and their offspring. And—in a room of her own—Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life makes me think of Emily Dickinson. I recreated these two poems while visiting my mother, who has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Pizarnik distills the fibers of existence so as to reveal the madness that palpitates underneath. Her poetry is contagious. The toughest part is to convey her silences. I wish I had met her.

—Ilan Stavans

Two Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik
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