By Dalia Taha, Tr. by Sara Elkamel

All my poems are attempts to copy, on paper, the poems before me: the inhabitants of my city. By day, I see them and by night, I write about them. In daylight, I observe how eyes compete with the dark circles beneath them for a larger share of each face, just as poem and white space wrestle to squeeze into one page. And at night, I wonder what each eye, shaped like a camera lens, had managed to record.

By Avot Yeshurun, translated by Dan Alter

A day will come no-one reads my mother's letters.
A pile I have of them.
Not from a her
No word.

By Salvador Espiru, translated by Andrew Kaufman and Antonio Cortijo Ocana

After, when it had already
caused me much harm and
I could do almost nothing but smile,
I chose the simplest
words, to tell myself

By Aura Christi, translated by Gabi Reigh

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
The pleasant tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
A white vulture splits the window
And its wax shadow tips
The whole house skywards.

By Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy

Dr. Dutka, who knew nineteen languages
(and with dialects, spoke twenty-four),
reflected the entire world, like an ancient mirror,
and sued his grandchildren for apartment space.

eyes

as a future blind person

I prefer to engage

with those who also have

blindness ahead of them