All Entries in the "Archive" Category
2 Poems – Joel M. Toledo (Philippines)
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 [...]
3 Poems – Iris A. Law (USA)
Bones
Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton, the Field Museum.
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 [...]
2 Poems – Badri Narayan, (Trans. Hindi)
Faith
I am mortal
but the book that I write so meticulously
is more mortal.
I am mortal
but my photographs kept in this album
are no less mortal than me,
penned down over so many years
these diaries of mortal-me
are even more mortal –
and how fleeting is my faith
that I would take these along beyond time.
I order my statues in my [...]
2 Poems – Steven Schroeder (USA)
Compulsory Military Exercise
Early morning, three
go slow against a sleepy
river of child soldiers
marching to someone’s idea
of a good war. The driver
of a small car honks
at every one as though
he thinks the sound will
make them turn
and say no,
but they flow
like water
around a rock
that has fallen
into the stream,
and he moves on
at the pace they set.
Another, in an SUV, [...]
3 Poems – K. Satchidanandan (Trans. from Malayalam, India)
In Memory of a Swedish Evening
(To Lars Lundqvist)
With steady hands
you went on pouring the
ruddy autumn in my goblet.
You read your poems
bright like the maple leaves,
filling the air like a Brahms symphony,
-sipping one mouthful for each line.
I translated your birds and trees into
my birds and trees.
Nouns revealed their core.
Verbs were inert.
There was a meadow
in your coat [...]
2 Poems – Suzanne Pemberton (Canada)
Cooking Show: Secrets of the Baba Nonya
Pulling out bits of this gutted fish flesh
which lies upon the chopping board
The fish has been deboned
The skeleton taken out
You can use a spoon to scrape the flesh from the skin
pinky white sticky lumps
If you smash it in a pestle
add some seasonings,
salty dried sole for that smoky reminiscent taste
You [...]
3 Poems – Bob Bradshaw (USA)
Old Li Po
Draining a tankard of wine, adrift in a small boat,
I grow content with the world’s beauty,
no longer a man labouring at the oars.
.
So Hong Kong
The garden is small, mostly vines
tethered to strings of yarn.
A lion watches from a back wall,
water cupped in his terra cotta paws.
“You need more space,”
my daughter says. “Your garden’s
little [...]
2 Poems – Rahul Rajesh (trans from Hindi, India)
Grain : one
A pair of oxen yoked to the plough
A farmer holding their tails
Revolving round the face of the earth
Lost in an intense prayer
The furrows the ploughshare is making
In the soil
The utterances of his prayer
Which would ripen into
Grain.
.
Grain : two
Grains…
Came to the khalihaan
From the fields
The jute-sacks swallowed
The entire granary
The sacks reached the traders’ market
Here, [...]
2 Poems – Michele Koh (Singapore)
I Have a Jabberwock
I have a jabberwocky
keeps me up all night
In the morning
it is tweedle dee
or tweedle dum
Dee for a good day
Dum for a bad
Sometimes it does a Cheshire cat
and my head flies away from my body
and I don’t know if I’m here or there
Then there’s holier than thou mad hatter
who whips my nerves about [...]
2 Poems – Anamika (Trans. from Hindi, India)
“To Be Or Not”
My marriage bed is above the noose.
Mirabai
This much English I learned to understand
the meaning of this line
but wish I could’ve learned Englishness well enough
to tie a knot in a noose, a tie,
my shoelaces too.
I can’t even tie ribbons on right
again and again on my way to school they came undone
the [...]
