I have returned to the United States from a study abroad trip in Spain where once again I read The Odyssey with my students. I often have students in my classes who are fraternity or sorority…

with photographs by Cole Barash Among the things I like about Thoreau is that he was born in 1817 and died in 1862 at the same age my father did, one hundred years later. So Thoreau’s lifespan is…

In those years when I bounded about on all fours, and on my elbows fled those I feared; when in those lucent days I scaled trees fast as a cat and sailed the treetops as the squirrels do, spreading…

He wakes, reads some Frost, and soon is ready To leave. “See you tomorrow.” A long line Of feeling follows him out the door. His shoulders Slope as usual in their way, carrying on them Deaths and…

Sometimes we wake with a cave in our chest, a dwelling we call Look here with me and weep. Sometimes we stumble upon an egg in the street, a walrus egg, though that barely seems possible.

Sometimes we wake with a cave in our chest, a dwelling we call Look here with me and weep. Sometimes we stumble upon an egg in the street, a walrus egg, though that barely seems possible.

I read Cyrillic and I fracture French; can find facilities in Germany and Greece; know just enough of folkway and odd song to make a wedding bearable, an amble worth the time. I have a stamp…

I recently reread one of my published translations. A mistake. This is not something I normally do, and for good reason: just as no piece of writing is ever truly finished, it holds even truer that…

In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević, trans. Anđelka Raguž. 176 pp. Linden Editions, 2025. £12. In late summer 2005, I disembarked in the city of Mostar after a three- or four-hour bus ride from…

If war is a film it’s not necessarily horror. In my case it’s a road movie (what’s your favorite road movie?) speeding across the deserted steppe past ranges of slag heaps and canyons of defense…

Those people who had nothing but, say, a hunting tool and a lot of ice had poetry, plenty of it, poems and songs for the sake of the life in them. —Marie Ponsot x Begging to differ, we have not An…

I left without saying goodbye to him, my escape quicker and quieter than I’d imagined. And now, as I walk down my street, everything has taken on a peculiar quality: the road narrower than I thought,…

Shrink yourself down to the size of the child you once were, and I will show you my house. Look inside its large bay window—of which I was as proud as if it were the nose on my own face—and you will…

I was born in a small city in Guatemala, whose cobblestone streets and colorful colonial architecture have long housed a healthy community of American ex-pats. Growing up there, Spanish and English…

Of all the half-lit compartments on Dauphine Street, I choose a bar whose name reverses with each fresh coat of booze, brick-walled and damp, where hipsters press quarters into slots, selecting…

Jennifer De Leon, a Guatemalan-American author who lives outside of Boston, has a conversation with Martiza Hintze, who was adopted from Guatemala in 1992 and currently lives in California. x x The…

Its Manchurian windows have vanished. The parapets, verandas, arches, cornices, railings, balconies, triangular plum blossoms proudly growing from its walls, the cat living in the staircase, the rain…

My new boyfriend said he was gonna fuck up my old boyfriend because he makes me cry and then tricks me into forgiving him, again and again and again. He was kind of sexy when he said it, my new…

The cut on my cheek stings and I’m reminded that life is dangerously unpredictable. My son runs circles around me and I stand small in the vast vault of the Milano Centrale train station, with its…

Each promise I break is toward a definition Of god. Angels decay, the breakwaters return Their low lives to water, the dunes Slip monuments. Polite, I tried even Loving a stranger. Into the dark…

David with the Head of Goliath, 1610 x And like Caravaggio, I am my own savior rent by my own hand. Depicted: A younger version of the painter heeds his own benevolence, having made lantern of his…

The piece actually began as an attempt at organization. I had been perusing scientific journals for other works and came across so many interesting extracts I couldn’t help but bookmark for exploring…

There’s nothing more powerful than pre-dawn melancholy. It oozes like a dirty light from the east, filters through the shutters, and everything—the trees, the garden, the birds—seems like the…

The girl in the birdcage rises with the rest of the city’s street birds. They caw her awake. Squawking seagulls cry. Piping pigeons coo, picking beads of morning dew off their feathers, which shine…

A literary magazine named after the Vedic fire-god. Transformative. The writer in witness, the imagination in combustion.

People said hardest. Some said hardest in a hundred years. You thought those people weren’t specific enough. Others said ninety-seven. The man down the hill agreed, he said I was alive then. He said…

A year ago, I wrote in the margins of a poem of mine, “IDEA: Could send out as letterpressed cards . . . recipients can begin to (&, eventually,) assemble the poem whole.” It was winter and Jenny…

To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in…

I thought she was married to the other woman Pearl her voice boomed like her brother’s he lived next door and her name was really Mary like in the Bible none of this made sense still it was true Aunt…

He was gorgeous, looking down at me. Very handsome. Both eyes red-rimmed but different: the left, all ecru milkiness, and the right, a swollen lump of sclera protruding like the bud of a new flower.…

You makke mee With soot & stolen Peaces of silke. You are noe fool— You wish For some thing Oulder than angel. I am noe green Witch, I know sweat & strong water, How to leave Frayd edges Under the…

Dear Janine: You think I don’t listen, but it’s not true. Tonight I listened. I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I put my ear to the wall. He felt me listening. I listened to him feel me…

I was tired of wanting, tired of morning, tired of the way the ocean waits for the sun to set. I was tired of thawing, tired of spring. Tired of hoping bulbs would rise. And when they did, I was…

Poet-pig who knows me, in the blindness, in the bog Waiting for Your Hunger, allow me to ask you Lord of pigs and men: Did you hear it by chance, or were you aware of a verb often heard by us here…

In the late summer evening, the two boys and the father came to a meadow. One boy had the eyes of his father and a similar walk; the other boy was a friend. They had been walking around the pond…

Stray Decorum by George Singleton. 220 pgs. Dzanc Books, 2012. $15.95. Bring the lights up on the silhouetted dogs sitting on the cover of George Singleton’s latest collection, Stray Decorum, and…

Three years after my mother’s death, I broke my left wrist in a fall. My right wrist was sprained, my dominant hand barely working. I couldn’t drive or open jars. I couldn’t wash my hair. I couldn’t…

And when the truth about the emperor’s clothes was revealed the crowd convulsing with laughter at his flaccid gullibility you noticed a young man easing the battered patty of a wallet from a bald…

Here’s what Jordie said: “To forgive, that’s human. To err, now that’s really divine. There’s nothing more beautiful than a big old-fashioned fuck-up.” Then, he shut the car door and walked down the…

There is only one entrance to the lush grounds of the historic Hotel Nacional de Cuba, in Havana’s Vedado district, and a uniformed guard is posted there at all times. Which is not surprising, since…

An artist’s life is an unconventional life….It appears to rebel but in reality it is an inspired way of life. —Agnes Martin, “Advice to Young Artists” I’m reading Anne Carson again. I didn’t know…

Saint Leonard of Noblac, d. 559, With your codex skin And shark-meat ass, you are here Floating in the cold air like blood, you are Trapped in the nib of my pen, In the most elaborate teapot In the…

1. By the time middle schools finally resumed classes, three years of complete freedom had turned my cohort—who’d last sat in a fourth-grade classroom—into a herd of wild things. There was never a…

Two cannibals are eating a clown; one turns to the other and asks— “Does this taste funny to you?” 1. When I told the clown joke to Nelson, he said, “The scary part is, how do they know he’s a clown,…

A literary magazine named after the Vedic fire-god. Transformative. The writer in witness, the imagination in combustion.

In the beginning there must have been a word, though what it was I can’t recall. An introduction. Some pleasantry, banal. In the beginning was a word—and then another, and another. We talked and…

We look for writing that catches experience before the crusts of habit form—poetry and prose that resist ideas about what a certain kind of writing “should do.” We seek out writers who tell their…

We look for writing that catches experience before the crusts of habit form—poetry and prose that resist ideas about what a certain kind of writing “should do.” We seek out writers who tell their…

To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in…

It was getting late and everyone was telling their gun stories. Times they’d had a gun pulled on them, almost been shot, or, for just a couple of people, times they actually had been hit with a…