By JOSÉ LUÍS PEIXOTO
Translated by HUGO DOS SANTOS
Alone, I arrive in a looted city
and walk slowly, my arms hanging
loosely, I look through open doors,
The wolf belongs to the boy I to the wolf
I ask permission to still be myself this time of night.
Sem barriga, sem fome, sem bebida. Blue notes
from a dead man’s tribute creep up my balcony.
Damn, you know how you know a song,
By BRUCE SNIDER
Over a hundred men suspected of being gay are being abducted, tortured and even killed in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya…
—CNN
Looking out at the blue sky
we listen to news
of men in Chechnya. Touching
counters, our washrags move like ghosts.
You sweep the kitchen. I tend the cry
of the washing machine, the low roof
that is our only roof.
By KC TROMMER
Louise Bourgeois, MASS MoCA
Inside the bounded mercury,
we keep going. All circuits that close
make serpents of us, constrict
and envelop every tender corner until
only a small portion
is distinct, our feet dangling like the end of a
sentence. We suspend ourselves
in a room full of light but take none in.
“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters.
Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
taller far than a tall man.”
—Sappho
A brief architectural brief
By JOÃO LUÍS BARRETO GUIMARÃES
Translated by CALVIN OLSEN
to Alexandra and Ricardo
on the arrival of Gui
We all have credit,
Said the bankers.
A matter of faith.
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger
By FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ
Winner of the 2020 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack
as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,
not black rock or islands of fog rising individual
in a barrenness of salt. It is not that
By ELIANE MARQUES
Translated by TIFFANY HIGGINS
To Marielle Franco, city councillor, sociologist, and activist in Black and LGBTQI+ movements, who was assassinated along with her driver Anderson Gomes in Estácio in the middle of Rio de Janeiro on March 14, 2018. Those who ordered the crime have not yet been brought to justice.
We are full of bullets from AKs in our heads and in our necks
With stray slugs that enter our bones our backs
We are in the Ecstasy neighborhood
But not dying of love
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