All Entries in the "Poetry" Category

Airport, T-Minus-Four Hours Iris A. Law (USA)

Having eaten my apple and returned my book to its dust jacket,
I sit, staring straight forward, keeping time to the bump
of bags rolling over linoleum as the light glances off the aileron
of a passing plane, slips across the face of the woman sitting beside me.
She is slumped forward in sleep, newspaper pressed to her cheek
like [...]

Bones Iris A. Law (USA)

If I slipped my hand
up under the strong curved
lines of your ribs, or trailed
my palm along the jut
of your coal-black thigh, would
you notice its warm pressure,
feel its remove from your fleshless
existence, collagen and keratin
startling against your naked bones?
A small boy chases a girl around
your cordon, clinging and dodging,
patella and tibia the axis of their whirling [...]

Currency Joel M. Toledo

I don’t anymore get impressed by sudden things
like thunderclaps or surprise birthday parties.
What I had wanted to say that September,
increments of sunlight bursting open
the hearts of surrounding children, is that
I wish instead I have grown old knowing
how to fish, for example, or to swim.
I walk into bookstores and feel
so much ache in their finish
and in [...]

Heart

I don’t anymore want melody
with its want for pleasing and pattern
and why should I have it lilting in the background
when consoling relatives? My heart
is forged for frailty and failure.
I am accepting this now: its many vessels
leading to sorrow, its southpaw stance. I pin
a right hand over it at times, out of duty or
earnestness or just [...]

Disparate Trajectories

I consider legends of the constellations, lovers
that revolve around each other perpetually
unsatisfied. That brief time we shared a room
you’d smile in your sleep, turning your face
toward me. You were disarming.
Our connection was tenuous and fragile
as the bonsai bought in China,
crushed into my camera bag, carried
through Mongolia and Taiwan,
smuggled past Customs into the country.
Across a black [...]

Heavy Metal Joy

Meeting you for lunch, I am so full of happiness
that I feel I am studded, wearing spurs,
I clink when I walk. I want to love you in the way
cilantro curls around the bone in the soup,
red pepper dissolves to pink —
to spend my force
in a desire to be direct, as in Mongolia:
a chunk of mutton [...]

You Linger

The teacher of silk painting
helped us choose brushes in Liulichang:
of the purple fur of rabbit coats in spring,
weasel hair, translucent
sheep’s wool, clear at the ends.
We stroked the tapering fullness, and I told her
how you used to tell your secrets to the chickens,
caressing them, because you knew they wouldn’t tell —
she laughed. And said there were [...]

Poem: Desmond Kon (Singapore)

:tasik gembira:
what a hardwood pageant world : our small berth

3 Poems: Inara Cedrins (USA)

You Linger
.
The teacher of silk painting
helped us choose brushes in Liulichang:
of the purple fur of rabbit coats in spring,
weasel hair, translucent
sheep’s wool, clear at the ends.
We stroked the tapering fullness, and I told her
how you used to tell your secrets to the chickens,
caressing them, because you knew they wouldn’t [...]

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (Hong Kong)

It is Impossible to be Partially Gutted

i
I vow never to speak to him again.
.
ii
If you know what he said to me,
you’ll understand—
Words coming out of his fingers,
in the cold darkening night: ‘I feel nothing
inside’, ‘plaything’.
.
You see, he sharpened
his words, each a blade, ready to kill.
He intensified his [...]