In this month’s poetry feature, ZACK STRAIT talks with RICHARD SIKEN about influences, confrontation, readers, accountability, sacrifice, balance, surface beauty, deep meaning, writing, and Waffle House.
Author’s Note:
Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.
Photo courtesy of author.
Berlin, Germany
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939
We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.
—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938
JEHANNE DUBROW is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, her husband recently completed his tenure as an officer, and this transformation led Jehanne to write Civilians, the final book in her military spouse trilogy, a sequence that began with the publication of Stateside in 2010 and continued with Dots & Dashes in 2017.
Novelist, poet, and Marine veteran spouse VICTORIA KELLY sat down with Jehanne to discuss Civilians, which confronts pressing questions about marriage, transitions, love, and war. Though they have known each other virtually for over a decade—as two members of the very small literary community of military spouse writers—this was the first time they connected face-to-face.
Victoria Kelly (VK): Your new book Civilians is the final volume in your trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse. Can you give us some background on your family’s experience with the military?
Jehanne Dubrow (JD): I’m the daughter of two U.S. Foreign Service Officers. I grew up in American embassies overseas. To be a diplomat is to be a civil servant; so, I thought I understood—through my parents’ work—what it means to serve.
By CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Translated by WENDY CALL & WHITNEY DEVOS
Poems appear below in English, and Spanish and Tutunakú, the original languages.
Translators’ Note
Poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez creates her work bilingually, in Spanish—the language in which she was educated—and in Tutunakú—the language in which she was raised. Tutunakú is the home language of approximately 220,000 people in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. It has multiple variants and Lucas Juárez seeks out speakers from different communities to expand her poetic vocabulary.
She generally begins writing in Tutunakú, but lines also come to her in Spanish, so she moves back and forth between the two versions of each poem, creating the bilingual pair simultaneously. “It’s two creation processes happening at the same time,” she says. Tutunakú is agglutinative, so it contains words up to a dozen syllables long that translate as whole phrases or sentences in Spanish. Her translation process must be “letter by letter, not word by word, because each word contains so much,” she explains. Tutunakú is also a highly metaphorical language: “being pregnant” translates to “I am not alone,” while “I miss you” translates literally as “My stomach is sinking.”
Although poetry is a regular part of Tutunakú cultural life, Lucas Juárez is the first woman to publish a book of poetry in the language. These poems are drawn from her 2021 debut collection, Xlaktsuman papa’ / Las hijas del Luno. The title, “Daughters of Luno,” uses the masculine version of the Spanish word for moon (luna). Luno is the metaphorical father of Tutunakú women.
We began co-translating “Daughters of Luno” in 2023, inspired by the depth of Lucas Juárez’ poetic voice, written when Lucas Juárez was in her early twenties. To create our English translations, we worked primarily from the Spanish, observing and listening to the Tutunakú versions, though neither of us has formally studied the language. We met with the poet in person and via video call, and also exchanged many messages. We are grateful for her patience, generosity, and linguistic expertise, all of which have been crucial to our process.
— Wendy Call & Whitney Devos
Table of Contents
“Litutunaaku” is the Tututnakú people’s name for themselves. The word translates as “people who belong to the culture of the three hearts,” referencing the brain (memory), the antomical heart (physical life), and the stomach (emotional experience). Together, these three interdependent “hearts” sustain Tutunakú “triple consciousness.” “Li,” the word’s first syllable, refers to a Tutunakú person’s homeplace—which is central to identity.
Poems by CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Having made both poetry and fiction contributions to TC, the multitalented Catherine-Esther Cowie returns to us this month with highlights from her debut poetry collection Heirloom, forthcoming from Carcanet Press on April 24, 2025.
Publisher’s Note
Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny, and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.
Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegize and celebrate her subjects.
Table of Contents
Raise the dead. The cross-stitched
face. Her eye-less eye. My long
longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered
hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments.
To exist at all. A comfort.
A gutting. String her up then,
figurine on the cot mobile.
And I am the restless infant transfixed.
Her full skirt, a plume of white feathers,
A Bedtime Prayer
We ate the fruit Lord,
boiled and buttered we ate.
Thought nothing of it.
It was pleasing to the eye.
Filled our mouths, our bellies.
It was the fruit of a breadfruit tree.
A tree as old as the first city.
How it grew taller than the house.
Those monstrous leaves.
Its roots echoing— cracks in the walls.
Its shadow falling through the back door, the corridor,
lengthening towards the front—
Ghost of our first father,
ghost begetting ghosts,
our lives thinned into his weakness,
his terror.
But we were fed, fed, fed.
*
Lord, you have cast us off,
left us to starve,
Sent that girl.
Girl born with a veiled face,
a caul, calling.
How did she find the axe?
She wouldn’t eat the fruit,
refused its sweetness,
weight of our father,
the first city.
Lord, she went down to the garden,
an axe flowering in her hand.
It was you Lord, the bouden blan
chirping in her ear.
What cruel instructions?
Didn’t we do your will,
kept a remembrance—
the tree,
our father,
we were hungry, Lord.
The tree fell into the house.
The War
St. Lucia, 194-
A disturbed hour, the sky loud
with the memory of assault.
But still, it’s Sunday, the trees shake
like shac-shacs in the breeze,
and the sea goes on and on
with its lullaby like it has never
given cover to the enemy.
It is Sunday,
and we go on with our lovemaking.
I refuse to hush, let my pleasure rise
against the weary tones
in the thin-walled rooms like ours,
it was yesterday, only yesterday,
another body washed ashore…
Forever and forever,
death our only guarantee.
Haven’t I died already,
years ago, on a kitchen floor,
under the weight of a different man,
my girlhood shot through,
I learnt the body as machine—
dead heart, dead pubis.
It is Sunday,
I teem with life like the flies
swarming the torpedoed ships
in the harbour.
Haunting
We frighten the children.
My hair ragged in red cloth,
I speak a language they don’t understand,
their ears tuned to English, tuned
to American cartoons.
And Leda, Gwanmanman Leda runs
cracks up the walls,
through the centre of our dinner plates.
It’s their own fault, you know,
they won’t stay in their rooms.
How she endures, endures,
Gwanmanman Leda. Leda.
Even after I married,
after she died, she endures.
Tanbou mwen.
Jab mwen.
But the children,
the children.
They stare.
Regard me strangely, sadly.
There will be no walk to the park today.
No jump rope high.
Only their rooms.
They will stay in their rooms.
Alé, alé. I chase.
They hide behind a wall. Spy.
I must clean my house like I cleaned Leda’s room.
Scrubbing. A form of memory.
A song. Trojan horse for my own blues.
Keeper of the madness.
The mad. Leda.
Mwen faché.
I was only a child,
only a child
made for play,
not the washing of soiled sheets,
of shit-stained walls,
of an old woman.
But the children,
how they stare.
Their blink-less eyes.
Pouty lips.
Why won’t they go into their rooms?
Leave me to Leda.
We are a pair.
She, because of her bad head.
Mal tèt. And I,
because I was a child.
Small. Piti.
Crushable.
Like a roach.
The mad and the little,
The mad and the little,
Give them a tickle,
Then a prickle.
Leda, stop your singing.
And I must stop this fool parade.
This arm muscling towards memory—
You’ve made it up,
Isn’t that what they said?
Mal tèt, bad head.
No one ever hit you. Mantè.
Isn’t that what they said?
But Leda, Leda,
my sweet Leda.
Mad monument.
Rogue memory.
But we must think of the children.
They cry for us, Mommy, Mommy.
Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St. Lucia to a Trinidadian father and a St. Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. Cowie is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.
Poems by S. VIJAYALAKSHMI, KUTTI REVATHI, and PUTHIYAMAADHAVI
Translated by THILA VARGHESE
A farm in Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by Flickr user Emily Abrams.
Mullai Nilam (The forest and pastoral region)
Forest Fire
By Vijayalakshmi
My forest is on fire,
and a solar sphere explodes within.
Transcript: Gray Davidson Carroll
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing. Gray also discusses how they started writing poetry, how they approach drafting and revision, and how their work in public health fits with and complements their work in poetry. We also hear a reading of Gray’s first poem in The Common, “November 19, 2022,” about the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs.
New work from ELIZABETH METZGER, MATT W. MILLER, ANNIE SCHUMACHER, and MARC VINCENZ.
Table of Contents:
This piece is excerpted from The Math of Saint Felix, a poetry collection by Diane Exavier ’09. Exavier will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
algebra
Retold by ILAN STAVANS
Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472) is the only pre-Hispanic Aztec poet we know by name. The word means “Hungry Coyote” in Nahuatl. But Nezahualcóyotl wasn’t solely a poet. He ruled the Texcocans, who, along with the city-states Tenochtitlán and Tlacopán, formed the magisterial Triple Alliance, which ruled from 1428 until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors almost a hundred years later. Nezahualcóyotl was also known for his philosophical meditations, his urban projects, especially aqueducts, and for his views on war, sacrifice, and the legal system.
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