The night is long and smooth [Read more...]

On Laval street where you lived leaves rise twisted in the wind’s snare and building facades shiver— night has a shaded face a cry pressed into frozen vines. On the balcony did you sit, thought-heavy high up from the wave-rocked street sure of the poems that were your life, a breakwater tides reaching far from [Read more...]

This translation is from the French version of the poem, “Musique de Granit,” which was translated from the original Bulgarian by Nicole Laurent-Catrice in collaboration with the author. Before I went to find it, it came to me … The River Neva. On these banks of leaden waves.* Swamps. Reeds. Sand. Wooden shacks sprouting like [Read more...]

When she tells him
the mechanic called,
her front brakes need
replacing, his reply
breaks up
into
single-
cell
organisms:
[Read more...]

More than thirteen years passed before Robin understood it wasn’t her leaving Paolo took as betrayal, but the light touch she gave to his groin outside a party. In front of a stranger in a brightly lit hallway, she had crouched down to entice a skittish feline, saying: Here, pussycat. This stranger, his suggestive remark, and [Read more...]

And blood, not soil, fuels the earth. [Read more...]

Wind swells the trees rain scratches at the night sullen as an unhappy woman irritated at being ignored until lightning unzips the air impatient to get naked sparks fly Zeus snaps his fingers and the deluge begins. You can hear the sighs as she pounds the ground, reaching for satisfaction.