Pain like dry stones

knocked together; like all-over-fires, never burning

low. As a child, I woke crying so loudly, it scared

the dogs.

Love is a river stepped in one

too many times. Who suers

most here, I couldn’t say.

This body, trudged through

many muds, legs like candlesticks,

catching.

lovers still—

co-sign their lives

to the weapons of their times

amidst the non-locals and halftime moons,

antediluvian webbed feet

impressed Earth with disaffections

My arm feels puffy—

a distorted turtle.

A purple alligator or dissected heart.

Then, I opened the door and left it on the doorstep.

It was still there in the morning, a scrap of need 

protesting its own failed adoption.

Then, I remembered that we’re never more than 

a stone’s throw away from a rat.

What if the rat.

By Dana Wall

When famous bodies fail, they do so at precise coordinates. Longitude: wealth. Latitude: legacy. Altitude: sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which skin preserves longest without visible condensation on glass surfaces. I've been mapping these terminal points since childhood, plotting each celestial departure on charts more detailed than any astronomer's.

Maybe I would just like to lie there twisted

In the yellowing plants of autumn

Without comprehending living, without

The pregnancy of fruit that we harvest.

There was more than just one bullet,

    were many,

Which riddled the earth they disappeared within,

In which they exchanged their earthly casings

For clouds of dust, from which man

Is said to have been made.

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.

Correct. The game is better upside-down

with our goonlegs hooked over the back

and our goonheads hanging off the seat

and the point guard releasing

the court from his Air Jordans, the ball

pulling the Earth to it, hoop rising

like a fish to bait—who would test relativity

in public but you?

the geese won’t stop
staring, their dark-marbled eyes carrying worlds
of hot steel opportunities,
obstructing pedestrian & cyclists
along the shit-stained channel of the Heritage trail

My heart pops unsteadily

through its ribbed bars

as I clutch the curious burst

of air in my throat, swallow

my fright with the tangy burn

of a seasoned mandarin slice

nicking my tongue.

I want to take a piece of him,

but there is nothing left.

So I reach for a lowered branch and pocket

a palm of florecillos to press between pages.

You can read a bible

on the bench, and people are

ignoring the tricks. There’s a beach

with plastic sand. When I run my hands

through it, they come out with an orange tint

and orange smell.

I want the noise. The too many

people in bed with no recourse

but to laugh. Argue. Play push.

I want the house to spill over,

overflow, drenched with problems

that now, at this age, are funny.

Suddenly our feet moved us onward, though it seemed

as we moved we were locked in a spell.

What I am saying is that we were bathed by the trees

while the wind bent their branches and again

they swayed over us before a different wind came

and then they drew back — like the coming and going

of an ocean there were waves of energy.

I’ve lost memories of most classes, faces of instructors,

names of many students I thought of as friends.

Yet prison comes back daily like an eagle in liver-lust

with me here chained to the past.

Nuns rattle keys in locks with cloven hands, clop down

corridors, dark as wailing mouths. The long dormitories stink

of exorcism, of mould crusting like old blood, of smoke from

a bonfire of birth certificates. Teenagers curl around their shame,

disowned, disappeared, already apocrypha in family albums.

If you come back tomorrow,

I’ll regret the way I’ve spent

my days stuck in the dryer,

shrinking, dyed red, like

the vintage T-shirts I leave

at the bottom of the basket

each laundry day that passes.

A sift of flaked leaves

and fallen moss—dirt

cooled between fingers,

crisp and brown, netted

grass itch for an earth:

By Adam Benamram

We used to stand on the tracks outside the tunnel and see who could stay there the longest once the lights rounded the corner.

By Arturo Cisneros Poireth, tr. Diana Sánchez Rivera

When I woke up, the pillow was soaked in black. It was sweat, and it was black. I went to the bathroom, and in the mirror, I saw a dark stain on my ear, like a dried thread of blood, but it wasn’t blood. Ashes were coming out of my ear. I scratched with my pinky finger, trying to clean it with my nail, which came out blackened.

Each year, a memory

Of tourists makes their way

Below the thermocline.

By Kim Simonsen, T. Randi Ward

This morning the ocean has again tossed man-sized

black boulders up onto the shelves of rock along the shore.

Sometimes you are carried by the wreckage

of your own ship—as helpless to direct this

flotsam as you were when it was floorboards

that lurched beneath disquiet cries of shorebirds.

A Photonovella of American Politics