Second floor, at the other end of the hall, second door to the left past the stairs. A small attic room with white- and yellow-striped wall paper. On the floor, rust-colored wall-to-wall carpeting; in a corner, a chair with the hole in its woven seat covered by a dark yellow cushion; a school desk; on a cherry wood dresser, a mirror and a candle holder. Behind metal blinds, the transom looks out on the big linden tree at the entrance to the garden, reminding me to have it pruned before the sap rises. Sarah is sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in jean shorts and a black tank top that reveals her tattoos.

“Our silver is also called the White Bride, lying on the bed. Together with her husband, the Crimson King, who rises from the coffin, they enter Mary’s bath, in which through primeval Dampness they will conceive a Son, who will surpass his parents in all things. Look, here the Father upon his throne devours his Son and profusely sweats, to which sweat the Ancients had given the term …”

Sora Kim-Russell is a literary translator based in Seoul. Her recent publications include Pyun Hye-young’s The Law of Lines, Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk, and Kim Un-su’s The Plotters. She has taught literary translation at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, LTI Korea, and Ewha Womans University. She served as the Spring 2021 Contest Judge for the Columbia Journal.

Grete lived in the same multi-story residential building adjacent to the shopping center as Arve but on a different floor. This floor wasn’t serviced by an elevator, so one had to make one’s way up there on foot. For this reason, the local government built a wheelchair ramp specifically for the disabled Grete so she could access her floor.

They are crossroads
welcoming traffic coming from all directions
but they aren’t destinations themselves.

It’s now fall and October—which means that the ghoulish among us can at last revel in the twilight of the year. It’s quite a beautiful season and month: there’s a nobility and a grandeur to this time of the year. Before we settle into ghost mode, though, we ought to pay homage to the fading grandeur of summer. The thought of a summer evening might help us do so, and that thought might lead to excellent poetry.

from so much water on the floor, the trail from bathroom to bedroom
that’s how a woman knows
another woman – knows if she’s washed her hair

I am two things: a prince and a little man. No one believes me when I say that I’m a prince. I notice that because they start grinning or flat out tell me I’m not. One boy asked me where my palace was.

What's the point of heading south—My dead friends:
Rafael Pérez Estrada, Vicente Núñez, Rafael Medina...; Pablo Garcia Baena and Jose de Miguel
have returned to their native Córdoba, nothing is the same

Here, we mee we sprawl
East to Kyoto to home
once we pass this gate.

Not the one that is gone
Perhaps the one coming
And as dreams burst seams

I was small.
It would’ve taken my entire life
to traverse the days dividing us.

Near the end of the hours, the background is the yellow forest of the painting; a day on which deer, and all else that is born and will one day die, are bound by an impossible connection. Two days prior, they learn how to pray: if what crowns the sky is a root, then I believe. Two days later, they sit in the sun, in a frame of white light, where the idea of the sky lies beneath their feet.

“I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
– Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (Translated by Erdağ M. Göknar)

Stranger, this is spring in my village:
from the very start, the east wind has opened every enclosure,
occupying each street corner and patio,
moving through the village locust trees to the fields beyond.

Too many voices, they puddle in the ear and the megaphone
stalks. The water’s cloudy, so much lost, sunk, floating,
turns into phone data parasite bacteria. The intricate road looks full
of intersections that form the wrinkles on your face.

My epitaph is a wild plant that grows
in the kingdom of sadness and regret—
A smile slinks past like a fox
and is lost among gray stones.

Muse of my ancestors, tell me how the plowman,
grabbing the crooked horns of his plow,
tears the barren breast of the earth;

Doa
To the devoted
My Lord

If crossing Dionysian boundaries is true poetry, then no one makes the poetry demon swoon like Douglas Kearney does. Kearney is a star-studded poet, performer, and librettist. Accolades include a Whiting Award and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016), and Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press 2015). His latest poetry collection, Sho (Wave Books, April 2021), provides a kaleidoscope of splintered selves and voices. In Sho, the speakers of Kearney’s poems are at once the antagonistic tricksters who enchant you (“I aspire to be a CVS: Lord”) and at once the documenters of historical and current wrongs (“Black wench! Clipped finches’/ shrill in brass lattice.”)