Issue 09 Poetry

Yelabuga

By VALZHYNA MORT

Maria does her washing by the wall
so bare that you’d think she shaved it.

The window’s open, anyone can see.
Soap hisses. Air-raid warning rings
like a telephone from the future.
Her dress is nailed onto the laundry line.

Yelabuga
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Poetry Never Stops Defining and Redefining Its Terrain (English & Spanish)

By LUIS MUÑOZ

POETRY NEVER STOPS DEFINING AND REDEFINING ITS TERRAIN

Poetry never stops defining and redefining its terrain. It has done so throughout history, since Aristotle, Cascales, or Antonio Minturno. But this task, which seems like a kind of  prison sentence, is also a fountain of intensity, a force.

Poetry Never Stops Defining and Redefining Its Terrain (English & Spanish)
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What Always Pulls at Me (English & Spanish)

By LUIS MUÑOZ

WHAT ALWAYS PULLS AT ME

What always pulls at me, like a persistent hand tugging on my shirt sleeve or at my pant leg, is the poem I haven’t written. Hey, it asks me, when is it my turn?

The blank code of my unwritten poem is inflated with announcements of what it could be and swagger. Much more than a poem already written, where limitations have already ended up imposing themselves and where initial intentions end up lowering their head in embarrassment…

What Always Pulls at Me (English & Spanish)
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I Went Sick as a Child

By ARSENY TARKOVSKY

Translated by VALZHYNA MORT

 

             I went sick as a child

with hunger and fear. I’d rip the crust
of my lips—and lick my lips; I recall
the fresh and salty taste.
And I’m walking, I’m walking, walking,
I sit on the steps by the door, I bask,
I walk delirious, as if a rat catcher led me
by my nose into the river, I sit and bask
on the steps; I shiver this way and that.

I Went Sick as a Child
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