All Entries in the "Poetry" Category

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 [...]

2 Poems: Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (Hong Kong/UK)

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 [...]

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 tibia [...]

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 [...]