Afterwards everything whitened
like paper or breath—
The room was suddenly anchored to itself,
the chains stopped groaning.
I knew I could not leave with you.
The sea outside was like the sea
on the map. A sea-god was blowing
into a crosshatched arc of sails.
Richie Hofmann is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals.
ABIGAIL MENGESHA
Steel kicks in this belly. // Girls with threadbare braids / weave between motor beasts and cement bags. // Tin roofs give way to glass columns. / Stretching as if to pet the clouds. // In the corners: cafés. // Where macchiatos are served / with a side of newspapers.
RANA TAHIR
If you look now, / the beaches are full. / People wading in the open gulf, / picnics, bonfires. / The sand whole, / not broken like an
eye dangling out / the socket. / The soldiers my father / misled must have found / the trench by the amusement / park
ZUZANNA GINCZANKA
I’m searching my thoughts for a man’s lips, to bind his arms in a braid, / When in the stifling sleeplessness of a second a sob breaks out— / —and now purse your lips and coolly, firmly condemn me: here you have my nights—bare, shelled like peas.
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