- POEMS

- HARD FEELINGS

POEMS

- Editor’s Note, June 2025

- Birdsong of Shaker Way

- Flipping the Bird

- Robben Island

- Rise

- Chicken for Breakfast

- From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“fruit fly”]

- From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“everyone’s/drawing the”]

- From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“each thread”]

- From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“I feel/felt by”]

- 短歌四首

- Four Tanka

- On Translating Shizuka Omori

- We Must Be in the Harvest Again

- The Ostriches

- The Star

- Lake Chateau

- An Optimism

- Mouth

- Do No Harm/I Dream of Goat

- October 9

- January 31

- February 14

- Pandemic Feature: The Breakfast Club

- A Children’s Story

- As Bee

- The Story I Tell

- Memorial Day

- Remembering the Owo Massacre and many others of its kind

- Ìbàdàn

- The Death of the Book

- Of Cicadas

- And Then the Sky Pulls Up in a Silver VW Polo

- Spiral, Surrounded by Spoiled Accord (Or, Schizoaffective, Unspecified)

- Resignation

- Temptation

- サーカス

- Circus

- 汚れつちまつた悲しみに ......

- On This Bit of Soiled Sadness…

- 骨

- Bone

- 曇天

- Overcast Sky

- On Translating Nakahara Chūya

- Dear Sister Agnes,

- For the Cult-Themed Party

- Carolee Schneemann—Interior Scroll (1975)

- Jenny Holzer—DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG (1978)

- Bharti Kher—Confess (2010)

- 𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰

- Lillie in the Reign of Terror

- Eloquence

- En la sala de velación: Septiembre

- Funeral home viewing room: September

- Intenciones de respirar [“Ni un día más allá la maleza"]

- Intentions to breathe [“Before even one day has passed"]

- Intenciones de respirar [“fantasía"]

- Intentions to breathe [“fantasia"]

- On Translating bruno darío

- All my life I was a bride married to amazement

ADRIAN MATEJKA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Editor’s Note, June 2025

Poetry, no matter if it’s coming in sixteen bars or sixteen stanzas, insists on communing.

BY Adrian Matejka

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

The writer Adam Bradley once said to me, “all rappers are poets” and I think he’s right. In the eighties, some of the great poet-emcees like Rakim and Chuck D introduced me to the concept of poetry. They showed me through their respective and eclectic bars that poetry’s habits are universal and transferable across mediums. Poetry can be offered and received aloud, written in script or in braille, signed or sung. It is malleable, transcending the strictures of its particular, versified container. Rhymes titillate the ear across languages; metaphor performs the same magic whether in Spanish or Vietnamese. Poetry belongs to all who write, read, sing, and sign it. It is “for the people,” as June Jordan taught us—despite the exclusionary positions of some critics. This communal posture is what makes poetry open to anyone who wants to engage with it as a writer or as a reader.

Because poetry is a wild and capacious art, anyone who might wish to pursue it beyond their own notebooks would do right to familiarize themselves with the mode. It’s important to gain poetic fluency whether the intent is to publish books, rhapsodize over a Beyoncé track, or rock the stage at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill. It’s important and necessary to honor various poetry genealogies as we move through the world as burgeoning writers.

Our editorial team at Poetry imagines each issue as a conversation that honors those genealogies while helping to create new ones. Poets from various generations and nations appear next to each other in our pages, revealing how voices chime most resonantly across time and place. In this issue, sculptural poems from CAConrad chat with Shizuka Omori’s tankas translated by Yuki Tanaka, which in turn converse with 2024 Poetry Ourselves winner Jessie Leitzel’s poem. The dialogue continues throughout: one poet’s form speaks to another poet’s narrative which then lends light to another poet’s lyricism. That’s how poetry works when at its most collective: each voice, style, and mode amplifies the excellence in another’s.

Poetry, no matter if it’s coming in sixteen bars or sixteen stanzas, insists on communing. It expects curiosity, too, like the poets in this issue—about words, about order, and about the ways we speak to others through our poems. These poets leave room in their words for those who might not know how to write a sestina but are surprised by the repetition. They invite those who are inspired by assonance and its attendant music. Improvisational as it can be, poetry is also beautifully inevitable, as available as the most convincing rhyme, whether it comes from an emcee’s microphone or a poet’s notebook.

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018–19, and he became the editor of Poetry magazine in 2022.

Matejka is the author of several collections of poetry, including: Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017); The Big...

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This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1682774/editors-note at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ANN-MARGARET LIM | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Birdsong of Shaker Way

By Ann-Margaret Lim

Every day is perfect, if

when you wake, you hear birds

in the garden, in the yard. Birds

up and down, ushering in one more day

in all the houses on Shaker Way. Birds

on telephone lines, light posts. Birds

twit, twittering on trees

hailing fellow birds

with a nod of  beak—gray kingbird;

top-hatted, streamertail

tuxedoed, doctor bird—

busy-bodied hummingbird

tucking in, out, of pink, red ixoras

punch-drunk in love. Birds

preening for, chatting up other birds—

the oriole, the grass quit, in mid-song

on the lawn, in a dance of  birds

an all-day-long conference of bird;

red-headed woodpecker

—drummer boy, or girl bird

in this daily symphony of  birds

—an orchestra on Shaker Way

in serenade of each perfect day with birds—

from the very first mockingbird

heralding, in solo warble

one more day, filled with birds—

brightened, lightened, trilled by birds:

precious, diamond-throated

sweet song, miracle-toting birds

the-gift-of-day-is-here birds.

Bird, bird, bird. Hello bird.

You lift me up bird.

You sing the day beautiful, bird.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682778/birdsong-of-shaker-way at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ANN-MARGARET LIM | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Flipping the Bird

By Ann-Margaret Lim

Holding his stare in mine, I flip the bird

at a grown man

on a stool in front of the street bar

on the left shoulder of  Red Hills Road

where big aluminum pots with crab, or soup

tell you when its Friday, or Wednesday.

He’d just pssst and winked at me—

a 12-year-old in the back seat

of a Buick Skylark

being driven by my Chinese stepmom.

Couldn’t be my hair

—hot-combed for graduation

styled in two limp pigtails

and a too-big bang

my teacher christened a bang-ga-rang

so, of course, me being a kid

I flip the bird at him, telling him

with my eyes, what the finger says.

Don’t think my stepmom—eyes on the road—

sees him, or me, flipping out

and flipping the bird at him.

Don’t think she hears him, flipping out

how a little “black gal” like me

pass mi place, damn renk an’ fiesty.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682858/flipping-the-bird at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

PAMELA SNEED | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Robben Island

By Pamela Sneed

The only antidote I may have to Trump’s election

is in a small ferry to Robben Island

one that shuttles you to the former prison

where those who fought against apartheid were held

The only answers may be in one wool blanket

a basin

toilet

cell

and the tiny windows of  Robben Island

in the discarded artillery

the rock and the limestone yard

where many were blinded

driven mad

Now the survivors former prisoners

give tours

their faces carved like tree roots exposed

The only answers may be in the surrounding peaks of Table Mountain

its Twelve Apostles

all now standing as testament to what

through years of struggles

can be defeated

overcome

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682780/robben-island at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

KAZIM ALI | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Rise

By Kazim Ali

home   flowers   grew

who   drew     me   in

this   shape     my   tow-rope

drawn   at   dawn       who rose

in   air   who   dispersed    in hours

days   wore   on         who   wore

this coat   of sun   son

worn   down   to dusk

who   turned   the husk or   shape

right   toward god      who left   this earth

who   flew   in waves   who waves

from shore   who knew   my ways   of rain

that seed   in blue lines   pool

who knew   me then   who knows

me now   who leaves     relieves

the shape   of earth

from whom   releaf

what rows   across the sky

the I in my life   relives   the questions

who knows   who left   who’s left

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682784/rise at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

KAZIM ALI | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Chicken for Breakfast

By Kazim Ali

A book led me to the particular performance of the cello suite

And watching the cellist play so tentatively, I imaged dance

A body moving slowly in the morning

Emerging from death

Chicken for breakfast

How do you survive even one morning even one day

With no mother to tell you

Time to change

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682782/chicken-for-breakfast at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

CACONRAD | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“fruit fly”]

By CAConrad

fruit fly born in hotel room died in hotel room you think I asked for this dream spanning an entire known world I might dance around you if I get a pair of bunny pants no one can afford to lose love I have explored the alternative it is a wasteland

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682786/from-first-light-88-frequencies-fruit-fly at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

CACONRAD | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“everyone’s/drawing the”]

By CAConrad

everyone’s drawing the Death Card the chair pressing four legs against a thought amplifying Thanatos over our dome of sleep I met an old chicken the rarest of chickens we spent the day inspecting every bit of life in a field gone wild

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1683169/from-first-light-88-frequencies-everyones at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

CACONRAD | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“each thread”]

By CAConrad

each thread added to the loom was a moment of the weaver’s life end of the world how did you get in my imagination we will not align with the stone column tipping into the sea since the day I arrived I have not wanted to leave

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1683178/from-first-light-88-frequencies-each-thread at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

CACONRAD | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“I feel/felt by”]

By CAConrad

I feel felt by another but I’m alone in the room I sing it gets stronger feel it on my skin a letter in the past tense about the future is my latest time machine you should try it I lean with motion this way then that I am not on a boat I’m in conversation with a friend who died years ago they are fine have a new job everything else is private now must end this poem right here

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1683180/from-first-light-88-frequencies-i-feel at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

SHIZUKA OMORI | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

短歌四首

By Shizuka Omori

やましさが案山子のように立っているからだを抜けてくるのか歌は

触れることは届くことではないのだがてのひらに蛾を移して遊ぶ

後ずさりできぬ鳥たち   二人称をずたずたにする夕焼けだった

皆殺しの〈皆〉に女はふくまれず生かされてまた紫陽花となる

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682860/duan-ge-si-shou at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

SHIZUKA OMORI | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Four Tanka

By Shizuka Omori

Translated By Yuki Tanaka

Translated from the Japanese

Guilt

is emptied out of a body

that stands

like a scarecrow—

is that what a poem is?

Touching is different

from reaching

but I move a moth

onto my hand

and play.

Birds that couldn’t

step back—

the second person pronoun

lacerated

by the sunset.

Massacre—

in the mass, women

are not included.

Kept alive, changing again

into hydrangeas.

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Yuki Tanaka.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682788/four-tanka at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

YUKI TANAKA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Shizuka Omori

What disarms us in Omori’s tanka is not confessional disclosure, but movement.

BY Yuki Tanaka

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

Tanka, or “short song,” is an ancient Japanese poetic form consisting of thirty-one syllables, dating back to the seventh century. While haiku is more widely known outside Japan, tanka remains the country’s most popular poetic form today. Since the pandemic, it has experienced a resurgence. Younger generations, in particular, have embraced the form, especially on X (formerly Twitter), where its compact structure lends itself to sharing everyday reflections and emotions.

Shizuka Omori’s tanka stand apart from this growing body of easily digestible, autobiographical poems. Her work is often surreal and abstract, and her speaker tends to speak from a remove, as if looking back on her life posthumously. In this sense, she might be compared to Emily Dickinson, some of whose most celebrated poems are written from the perspective of a dead speaker reflecting on her life. In Omori’s case, this posthumousness partly comes from the way she takes full advantage of a crucial difference between haiku and tanka: unlike haiku, which traditionally compress a moment of perception into seventeen syllables, tanka offer fourteen more, creating space for reflective distance.

Omori’s tanka shift fluidly between the concrete (“moth,” “sunset”) and the conceptual (“Guilt,” “the second person pronoun”), and I have tried to retain this dynamism in my translations. In translating her work, I was often reminded of sonnets. Just as a sonnet’s structure—octave, sestet, volta—traces a movement of thought, so, too, the tanka’s traditional 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic structure. The first three units form the “upper phrase”; the final two, the “lower phrase.” I chose not to replicate the exact syllabic pattern, since its rhythm is nearly inaudible in English. Instead, I focused on how thoughts and feelings evolve across the poem—through each syllabic turn.

Poetry is an odd genre: out of the blue, a stranger speaks to us, and somehow we feel compelled to listen. What disarms us in Omori’s tanka is not confessional disclosure, but movement—the way the mind sways, swerves, and hesitates. I hope my translations have captured something of this intimate restlessness.

Read the poem that this note is about: “Four Tanka” by Shizuka Omori.

Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. He is the author of the poetry collection Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). He also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton University Press, 2024). He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.

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Author

Shizuka Omori

Shizuka Omori was born in Okayama City, Japan, in 1989. She is the author of three tanka collections: Hectare (Bungei Shunju, 2022), which won the Tsukamoto Kunio Award, Camille (Shoshikankanbo, 2018), and...

Poem

Four Tanka

By Shizuka Omori

Translated By Yuki Tanaka

Guilt

is emptied out of a body

that stands

like a scarecrow—

is that what a poem is?

Touching is different…

Poem

短歌四首

By Shizuka Omori

やましさが案山子のように立っているからだを抜けてくるのか歌は

触れることは届くことではないのだがてのひらに蛾を移して遊ぶ

後ずさりできぬ鳥たち   二人称をずたずたにする夕焼けだった

皆殺しの〈皆〉に女はふくま…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1684886/on-translating-shizuka-omori at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JESSIE LEITZEL | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We Must Be in the Harvest Again

By Jessie Leitzel

The end of summer

and our jalapeño plant

is wilting, its stem brittle

as the heat peels

away from us,

though we swore,

like every August,

that we would die

from it—I have, too, thought

of my great-grandfather, peeling

sweet corn in the heat.

My living room

smells of the soil

he tracked into his home. It’s ruthless

in how it doesn’t fade: walking

on the balls of my feet,

I pretend I know

how everything would unfold

while husking. How the skin

would break, the crop

yellow and stringy,

tinged with dirt. There’s a tale

told in my family

that says our people grew

straight from between

the rocks: ankles rooted

in tilled earth, skin smelling

of good loam, our bodies

the first wild crops—

there’s a lot about farming

I should know,

but don’t. It’s cruel

how strong the smell is,

some nights. How habitually

it reminds me

of the place

I am not. My father

brings home a sheaf

and I crack into one

by the stem. Bury

my pointer finger

in its twine

like I’m seeding my body

into its roots, like I’m belonging

to this land

instead of searching

for a way

back into it.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682790/we-must-be-in-the-harvest-again at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

DOROTHEA LASKY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Ostriches

By Dorothea Lasky

In every rose there is the scent of death

I thought I was one of them

But I’m not and I’ve never been

Who cares about me anymore

No longer will I sit in the sun

When I get a poem I kill it

No instead I’ll just fall in love or just die

I don’t expect you to care about it

You’ve never cared about me at all

When I feel a poem sprouting out

I shut it away

Deep in the folds of time

I’ve never meant anything to anybody

In every flower there is the stench of the infinite

When I’m handed a poem now, I send it back

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682792/the-ostriches at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

DOROTHEA LASKY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Star

By Dorothea Lasky

Helen Frankenthaler is an evil eye

I put her behind me

And hoped for the best

Even she knew

I was lying

Lying is godlike

I’m almost always lying

In a poem

All these women and their sadness

We think of the other dimensions as vast

Is it possible that other dimensions

Are very small

And when everyone just keeps writing sonnets

Are sonnets just platforms for the emotion

And if so

What kind

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682794/the-star at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

DOROTHEA LASKY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Lake Chateau

By Dorothea Lasky

I still feel the same

As the day that I first met you

Though softened by all of this time

I still think of you with roses

Spilling all over your abdomen

Your poetry and my abandon

I still feel the same

Wrapped in furs on the carpet

My heavy cologne all over you

The same

As the moment

When I first saw you

Those wreaths

Of roses and pine needles

All over your hair

Is this the same—

The girl with dandelions

In her lap

Is this romance

God no—(this is the end of the world)

It’s dread

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682798/lake-chateau at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

CAMERON AWKWARD-RICH | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Optimism

By Cameron Awkward-Rich

It is morning. Remember that.

It is morning and the house is quiet,

so quiet that I can, for the moment, set myself

to wandering. I can sit patient at the door.

I can beg and bang to be let in. I am

turning this way and that. I am circling

the hole in the world of my imagination.

Let me in. I am saying the words, predictable

as any key—when I was a child,

when my mother, when the swarm of bees,

when I spent my days in mud among

the worms, rushing down the hill, our flooding

yard, when Hannah’s brother, her mother,

when I was too unclean, too wild a thing,

when I was barred from, when I sat alone

in the snow behind her house, pristine,

when, briefly, J and I were, when we

flew darkly down the green suburban

street, when he loved me, or something

in me and I loved the wind between us,

our bloody knees, when I think back, I am

nearly always otherwise alone, though

I never was alone, child of the salamanders,

child of the morning snow, the shamefaced

leaves. All my life, certainly for as long

as I’ve known I had a life, I was

like the sparrow right now outside

my window, flying headfirst, incessantly,

into what must seem, to her, like sky.

All around me people moved and laughed

and seemed, from where I fell,

to understand some silent thing,

some secret word that made itself

no home in me. Aggrieved, the world

of other people. I let it go.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682796/an-optimism at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

MONA ARSHI | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mouth

By Mona Arshi

From the mouth of  Eurydice (Antigone)

When I was thirteen and dumb as bark and

married to a king and looked into mirrors

my mouth unwatchable my mind wandering

to the mouth you can train the mouth to

surrender itself to the eye or you can erase

the mouth through a series of thought

experiments involving lying to yourself and

the mouth employing a strategy of epigrammatic

wit in front of strangers and visitors in damp

badly lit anterooms or you can steer a mouth

through complex syntactical thickets when you

feel exposed, you can make the mouth sore with

expletives ... oh the brag of the mouth!

The mouth’s gentle implication, mouth-work

a mouth open, the King will roam

close to the mouth, land of the mouth, empire

of the mouth, oil-spill, flush-swell of the mouth.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682802/mouth at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

MONA ARSHI | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Do No Harm/I Dream of Goat

By Mona Arshi

From the mouth of Eurydice (Antigone)

I haven’t killed a single thing in

Months and hand on heart

It’s getting tiresome.

I take soft steps in my room.

Delicately, I scoop the scorpion out

From under its chair.

The fire ants feast on the soft

Of my thigh and I resist flicking

Then flattening their bodies with my nails.

All summer, I haven’t harmed a living

Thing apart from in my dreams.

I greet the salamanders with a bow

And smile showing no teeth—

No offence ... no offence!

I am a model of virtue. My axe, it grows dusty.

Meanwhile, I dream of goat.

In the field of my dreams

I am butchering the ancient woods,

Stoppering the rivers and

Suffocating the flame-pink brain coral.

I have taken to a breakfast of

Warm eggs from the nests.

The black snakes tremble when

I’m close and I eat and eat

Until I’m full of goat then awake in a

Fervour on my thin mattress, the dream curtain

Still fluttering—half in half out of the killings.

The priest determines that dreaming is

Not cheating as we count my miserable sins.

How harmless can we really be?

Patience, blessed woman, soon you’ll cradle your

Son on the untried temple steps.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682800/do-no-harm-i-dream-of-goat at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JESSE NATHAN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

October 9

By Jesse Nathan

For today I’ll try to memorize the strange wide shape

of two writhing coast oaks

the way a fog looks like pashmina

laid on the rim of the hills

the way a nurse kneads and pulls

my shoulder to find a place to pierce

and finally drives the sweet vaccine through my tattoo

of a barnswallow, mystic advisor—

bird he says he’s never heard of

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682804/october-9 at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JESSE NATHAN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

January 31

By Jesse Nathan

In front of thousands on a Sunday

the Pope at the Vatican released two doves.

He rang a bell, sang Hail Mary

full of grace the Lord is with Thee

and then a crow and a seagull

swiftly out of nowhere

ripped apart the doves,

the pontiff still huddled at the window,

the crowd below

shifting and whispering.

I’m in the living room

reading aloud the news from Rome

when Josie tells me he hates

poetry readings. Says that’s where poets

drown their poems

in the lake of enunciation.

Or slaughter them

with the dull blade of poetvoice.

Guess I agree, I say. But maybe

these events are like church,

sometimes tedious

but reflecting a desire among the faithful

to make a sacrament.

Josie shrugs. We aren’t churchgoers.

Almost 9 PM, and I’m finally hungry.

Saltines, banana, chicken noodle soup.

Hunger a limit, a violence—

but it is life calling.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682806/january-31 at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JESSE NATHAN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

February 14

By Jesse Nathan

Going to the Russian bathhouse on Innes

to lie naked on a shelf in the steam

while the hatted man

swanning about with a birch branch

prances and lashes my calves and my ass

while you look on grinning

he lashes my chest and my parts and my arms

and flapping his hot birchy air

over finely scratched skin I sing

O muse of flagellation whose ways are formal!

O tingling effusions O circulation

O vivisection of the bum!

submit us to sensation

and deliver us to the pool of cold cold water

our bodies smarting

so our flesh may crawl

without meaning like our lunatic selves

sting like a lover’s pinch

which hurts and is desired

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682808/february-14 at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

PETER KLINE | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pandemic Feature: The Breakfast Club

By Peter Kline

If we’re put here long enough, someone’s bound to learn something. The sweep of the second hand erases possibility; familiar postered walls become fortress and prison; the town outside transforms into what once happened. Our interiority grows big as the world. Eventually the last bell will ring, releasing us to begin the long walk back into singularity. But for now, we are collective, if too far apart to hear each other whisper. A fear may get stirred up by a puff of breath, then swirl through the air. There are lessons to be found in these ancient desks where many hearts are gouged. The empty chair that faces us is an eloquent teacher.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682810/pandemic-feature-the-breakfast-club at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

PAULA BOHINCE | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Children’s Story

By Paula Bohince

Again, an ousted child or orphan happens onto a den.

It happens then. Invitation by faun or badger to rest from

mayhem, undress to white ruffle.

Where the tea in its tin gets shook into tarnished teapot

fetched from on tiptoe in an off-kilter kitchen.

Cakes with cream and jam are presented (please, delicious,

yes, thank you). Manners are everything. Woolens dry

before the fire’s cauldron. This is the slumber where nothing

happens. The creature-wife wears an apron,

the meek husband glasses. This is the pause in the plot

where I’ve lifelong returned. Whenever I bend to the cat, asking,

How can I help? I’m in it, intuiting her needs

with gentleness. I tell this story. My therapist says,

Like a parent. The rain’s changing dramatically

to snow, making the threshold impassable.

Weft of fur in my pocket, I spy speckled beans and cider,

thick brown bread and yellowest butter. Mice

are sleeping on extra slices, the ladybugs in matchbooks.

It’s blizzarding and will for days. I can smile, nod,

offer simple phrases and am treated by strangers

as innocent. The safest I’ve ever been. The room’s foggy

with kettle steam, the pages damp as I turn and turn, reading

in peace on a loveseat that at night becomes my bed.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682812/a-childrens-story at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

PAULA BOHINCE | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

As Bee

By Paula Bohince

Forgive my trespass, I mistook for work a crown

of raspberries and custard. Thank you, tartlet, thank you,

Miss, for arranging it on a doily on a saucer, thank you, Nature

for these hypnotizing concentrics. My mother

(did I have one?) was likewise hypnotic. My queen,

she used and tossed me, thoughtless, from the palace.

But this isn’t a poem of woe. I’m illiterate

to that emotion. Spackled with sugar,

I’ve swum through dispassionate debris. I’m ready

to lie, freakish and freezing, in a berry.

This is my first and only spring on earth. I get it.

I’m free as an orphan who’s aged out of a baffling system.

Still, the snowfall mornings. Still, the rosy sometimes.

To be alone in this world is fatal. I accept that.

It was all a blur, anyway. No biography. A complicated coin

paid my passage. Thank you. I won’t be returning.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682814/as-bee at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

AARON SHURIN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Story I Tell

By Aaron Shurin

The gates, the gardens, the windows, the sky, the ledge of  bricks, the fallen leaves, the porch where I kissed you long ago, the name you unraveled inside my head, the piece of a body stuck to the wall, the ticking clock that caught in your teeth, I read a book, I take a walk, I swallow the sky of here and now, I shake my pockets to hear my coins, I move the table from here to there, I struggle to struggle with honor and truth, I remember the hair that stuck to your lips, I taste your lips with the hair on my tongue, I whistle alone when the light is dim, the stove, the sofa, the creaky door, the bed, the blanket, the common bonds, the morning rays, the salty skin, the story I tell of the story we made, September, October, November...

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682816/the-story-i-tell at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

AARON SHURIN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Memorial Day

By Aaron Shurin

And still one looks to the tree to paraphrase the sky, arbiter of wind and sun. The hills with their crosshatch houses and vertical streets ... You gave an impassioned speech to the pigeons, who lifted, as if with one wing, into a wheeling arc: hiss of the air streaming through their gray feathers; it sounded like kiss me or kill me I couldn’t tell.

This is the life of your time. Look the clouds puff and streak as a gesture of faith. You are written and erased

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682862/memorial-day at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

DAMILOLA OMOTOYINBO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Remembering the Owo Massacre and many others of its kind

By Damilola Omotoyinbo

Even the temple testified to the fragrance

of her hymns—before she was slain

right on the pulpit. While God watched in awe

what man can do to his kind. To some,

this is just a show. A boy walks the road gingerly,

each step afraid of the next, a trigger-happy

policeman might mistake his gun

for a bouquet of flowers and watch till the boy’s

vintage shirt blends with the tint of roses

his gun would spit. This place

is not an abattoir, but each day

her people are severed

into bits. On the atlas, home

is a meadow of unmapped graves.

Meet the people and you will see how

they have learned to wear their pain

like a beautiful corset—a little too tight

but they still make a joke out of it.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682818/remembering-the-owo-massacre-and-many-others-of-its-kind at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

DAMILOLA OMOTOYINBO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ìbàdàn

By Damilola Omotoyinbo

After J.P. Clark

seven hills beckon

the sun to a dance. two steps

forward, another to the left. kongas powder

their rhythm on the rusty face of Beere & Òjé.

like a blooming peduncle, Bódìjà gives her arms

to the wind. bejeweled hips

of Agodi sway in joyful

abandonment. amidst the seamless blend

of Sángo, houses with smelly

gutters cluster like beehives. here,

street children stomp their feet

with hysterical laughter. slowly,

Mókólá opens up its mouth,

the melody drowns in a pool

of  honking vehicles.

the day is not ripe

but a muezzin harvests it with a sickle,

spreads it on a tray & calls the world

to feast. a preacher would not bulge,

he walks past, throws a punch-like sermon:

the world will end soon. the world might end

now. he walks on, jagged alleys morph into neatly

paved roads, where humans in Micras groan to the music

of communal misery. he walks on,

till he finds people speaking in the tongue of  his

neighbor. everywhere is home.

every road leads to our doorknob.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682864/ibadan at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

LUKE ALLAN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Death of the Book

By Luke Allan

1. This morning the nurse tested me for allergies. She said she’d test for “known allergies,” which seemed sensible. She wrote the numbers 1 to 35 on my back with a special pen, counting under her breath as she went. I wondered whether it was possible to be allergic to the pen. At some point she had to stop and erase some of the numbers with a cloth because she’d run out of space. I said this is what it must feel like to be a piece of paper. She didn’t reply. When she’d finished setting up her grid of numbers she handed me a laminated poster with a list of thirty-five things on it, things like tree bark and plastic swimming equipment and dust. She said that when she applied the irritants it would feel like I was being scratched by a cat very gently, thirty-five times, and I thought oh god yes please. When she was done she set a timer and left the room. While I waited I looked at my back in the mirror and saw that she had arranged the numbers in two columns, one either side of my spine. There was a faint red scratch through each number, like the crossed-off days of a calendar. When the nurse returned she looked at my back and said I didn’t have any allergies. Then she erased the numbers with the cloth and I thought, known allergies.

2. Sometimes, for a little while, clouds gather into the shape of an animal, and that’s you. There’s stuff, and right now one of the things that stuff is is your body, and over the coming years it’s going to slowly disband again, fraying at the edges until eventually it isn’t recognizable as you anymore and it goes on to be other things (ships, crickets, glycerine, laughter). The first time those clouds gathered into the form of a book was about two thousand years ago. But most of those early formations have long since come apart. There are a few that still look like books enough to be interesting, and there are people whose job it is to stop them from coming apart any more than they already have, and they do this by putting them inside glass boxes where there’s no wind. I have met people whose job this is and they are very interesting, because their job is to put old things in boxes and suck the time out. They have to make sure none of it slips back in before they can get the lid on.

3. A government form asks for my “mother’s current address.” I make multiple attempts at responding in the box. “N/A” is too sad. “She’s dead” is too wounded. “Heaven” is strong, but it reads like a joke. Likewise “underground.” Eventually I settle on “she’s no longer alive so has no current address.”

4. When one witness writes of my mum’s dead body, “she was wearing a green and blue flowery summer-type dress, which is one of her better items of clothing,” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

5. She’d been inside that body her whole life. Then she returned it, like a library book, disappointed.

6. This morning the nurse asked whether I had fallen in the last twelve months. I said I hadn’t, or not that I could remember. A sign on the wall, above a piece of medical equipment that looked like an old telephone, said FIRM TOAST. I wondered why that would be a thing. I stared at it while the nurse typed at the desk beside me and eventually the words changed to FOAM FIRST. The nurse asked whether I had someone registered as my emergency contact. I said I wasn’t sure. She said there was a form I could fill in. I said in that case I’ll just die. Then she left to get the doctor. When the doctor arrived he was truly the friendliest doctor in the world. I thought we should have dinner together. We talked for a while, and when he left he patted me on the shoulder. He was going to get another doctor, his boss. I had made it to the end-of-level boss of the hospital. While I waited for her I looked around the room for something to notice.

7. According to this pamphlet, grief can cause difficulty breathing, tightness in the throat or chest, and muscular weakness. On the front cover there’s a photograph of a plastic lawn chair in the sea.

8. I am still grieving in this body. I am grieving it to death.

9. The worst part is the total indifference most days. The numbness. The heart pumps it out like milk. Heartmilk. Banana flavored.

10. According to recent studies, the average human body now contains so much microplastic that if you were to extract the plastic from all the human bodies on Earth and mush it together, you’d have enough plastic to build a life-size Lego model of Princess Diana.

11. Yesterday I stopped to pat a tree and accidentally put my hand through a nail. Vala said, that’ll teach you for patting  just any old tree. I said it wouldn’t. She said you have to look first before you put your hand on a tree. Later, in bed, we debated whether or not you’re allowed to look at the sunset. She said it permanently damages your eyes. I couldn’t accept this, because people have watched the sunset for thousands of years, that’s why it’s so famous. The sunset. Then I looked it up and she was right. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

12. To say I have a memory like a sieve would be an insult to sieves. I have a memory like a basketball filled with glue. I have a memory like a plastic croissant on a windowsill that someone is pointing to and saying, it looks so real.

13. Sometimes, when I want to just sit and think, on a bench or the steps or whatever, I take out the book from my bag and pretend to read.

14. One of the items that came to me after mum died, amid the frantic repatriation of her stuff, was a slim book of poems written by my stepdad. The cover is a glossy mass of headachey yellow, the color they dye cheap lemons. On the front there is a drawing of a motorbike with a seagull perched on the seat, and above it the words Love, Life, and Seagulls on Motorcycles. The poems are mainly erotic odes to my mum. One is dedicated, “to Kathryn, for being my home.”

15. David played a twelve-string guitar and rode a Harley Davidson. He was an enormous man—laughably big-boned. Got some small parts in real TV shows. All bad guys. He had the face of a smuggler and the moisturizer of a genius. A saint in the kitchen and a camembert in the hallway. A hard-to-place man, he was impossible to miss. I miss him.

16. How can I possibly talk about that loss? Losing David, who loved me, and then losing mum, who killed herself. It’s a black hole eating another black hole. A desert in the air. A severed hand on the table that turns out to be just your hand.

17. I pick up a collection of Kafka’s short stories, hoping he can help me. I flip to a story at random. It’s narrated by a dog. I put it back.

18. Once I walked from Pisa to anywhere, and I knew it was Italy because of the happiness. The headache in my chest that I think, looking back, was mum, softened a bit in the miles of nothing between those little villages. In one village I stopped to get out of the sun and to deal with my feet. I sat in a covered alley and ordered something from an old man who emerged from a dark interior, through a waterfall of beads. While he was taking my order, a postwoman came by and handed him a bundle of letters, which he tucked into his apron. It was noon. Just after. I thought it was quite late for post. My marriage, when it comes, a couple of years from now, will fix nothing. But it will help me to see that the desire to be fixed is selfish and lonely. Like, we cherish the idea of ourselves as broken. It gives us the excuse we need to be nasty to ourselves, to punish ourselves, even while we insist on the inviolable goodness and sacredness of other people.

19. One of the central issues of our household, I would say, is Vala’s insistence on leaving her fruit stickers stuck to the edge of the sink. They amass like little trophies. Eventually I peel them up and put them in the bin. I love her.

20. Vala can’t throw away a jar of pickles that has passed its date; she has to open it and “free” the pickles first. She can’t bear the thought of them being inside the jar forever.

21. A few weeks after mum died I received an email from a police officer. It contained a zip file of witness statements made by friends and colleagues, people who’d seen her in her final days. Disgusted and excited, I pored over every word. I believed that one of these people had secretly murdered my mum, and that if I read the statements closely enough I would find the clue, the small but telling inconsistency. But all I found was a cast of bewildered and heartbroken strangers, a collection of short stories about oh fuck. I’m not sure which was worse, the repeated descriptions of her death from slightly different angles, like a 360-degree photograph of pain, or the fact that none of them had done it: their refusal, line by stupid line, to have secretly killed my mum.

22. The problem with the world is there’s only one of it. If something goes wrong there isn’t a backup. It just grinds on, full of the error.

23. Today Vala found an audio recording of a black hole. But she won’t listen to it, and she won’t let me listen to it while she’s in the room. I have a feeling that, somehow, hearing that sound would be like putting the pickles back in the jar.

Notes:

Author’s note: “The Death of the Book” is excerpted from a book-length work in progress titled “The End.”

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682866/the-death-of-the-book at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

LUKE ALLAN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Of Cicadas

By Luke Allan

A wood is a collection of distances between trees. America is a collection of distances between cicadas.

_____

If you stop where you are and just listen, if you simply stop and listen to the sound of the cicadas in the trees, you have tasted true disappointment.

_____

If cicadas made a more beautiful sound, America would be a different country.

_____

For every one cicada, there are ten cicadas.

_____

Wittgenstein said, “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.” Try telling that to cicadas.

_____

The absence of cicadas is the honey of winter.

_____

Deep inside every rock there is silence. Deep inside every cicada there is America.

_____

Cicadas. What do they want?

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682820/of-cicadas at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JOE CARRICK-VARTY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

And Then the Sky Pulls Up in a Silver VW Polo

By Joe Carrick-Varty

the sky announcesit has written a lecture

on domestic violence no one starts a family

with the intention of becoming

the violent dictator of that family

we get inside the car between drags

on a Silk Cut the sky takes the register

we head deeper and deeper into the desert

which i understand isn’t really a desert

but more an immersive representation

of history occasionally the sky stops

to collect a different member of my family

i love how the sky takes care

to lower the accessible ramp

i want to reach around the sky’s

broad shoulders i want to ask the sky

all my favorite questions soon enough

the car is uncomfortably full my nana

squeezes in next to me she looks young

and sunburnt and 100% not dead by suicide

she checks the buckle on my booster seat

when our shoulders smoosh together

i get a tingly feeling because this

is the first time that our skin has touched

i begin to worry i won’t have anything

interesting to say about the sky’s lecture

my nana tells me to stop being silly

after some time we arrive at a garden

giant eucalyptus trees for miles

my nana leads me by hand

to her favorite tree remember she says

to find your tree it’s very important

i know without asking that my nana

had to die to find her tree

she loves the sound of the wind

through its branches i make a pact

with my future i squeeze my nana’s hand

but she’s gone just the wind prehistoric

and the sky calling me back to the car

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682868/and-then-the-sky-pulls-up-in-a-silver-vw-polo at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

RICKEY LAURENTIIS | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Spiral, Surrounded by Spoiled Accord (Or, Schizoaffective, Unspecified)

By Rickey Laurentiis

What I have done is created

History, exquisite manuscripts

With angering blame.

What I have done is created

manuscripts

in pity of me

culpable

my Spain loneliness

exquisite

in pity of me

misery

What I have done is created

manuscripts

berserk with anger

culpable

berserk with anger

history

What I have done is created

misery

Do I know myself?

manuscripts

Do I know myself?

history

What I have done is created

culpable

Blame, a spoilt milk—

manuscripts

Spoilt dignity—

misery

What I have done is created

culpable

Blame angered with berserk

Manuscripts exquisiting history.

What’s created is done. What am I?

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682822/spiral-surrounded-by-spoiled-accord-or-schizoaffective-unspecified at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ALICE PETTWAY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Resignation

By Alice Pettway

The dry stubble of the field

wilts under the rain,

soft as jaw hair

under a hot towel. The summer

is a slim blade

at winter’s throat.

We are all hoping for the season

to change, for something new

to emerge

from the small nicks

in our skin, undeterred

by the styptic rhythm of emails

and stand-up meetings.

Already the hard drop of blood

is separating

cleanly from skin, already

we have given up hope

of bleeding freely.

A wild turkey

lifts its reptile legs one

after the other

across last year’s crop,

carrying its dark body

to the trees

where it is indistinguishable

from the dead wood and stones.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682870/resignation at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ALICE PETTWAY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Temptation

By Alice Pettway

The blades of grass are writhing

their torsos,

sexualized

unnecessarily.

The people are uninterested

in their undulations.

But oh the stock market, thrusting

its ample hips

against expectation.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682872/temptation at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

サーカス

By Nakahara Chūya

幾時代かがありまして

茶色い戦争ありました

幾時代かがありまして

冬は疾風吹きました

幾時代かがありまして

今夜此処での一と殷盛り

今夜此処での一と殷盛り

サーカス小屋は高い梁

そこに一つのブランコだ

見えるともないブランコだ

頭倒さに手を垂れて

汚れ木綿の屋蓋のもと

ゆあーん   ゆよーん   ゆやゆよん

それの近くの白い灯が

安値いリボンと息を吐き

観客様はみな鰯

咽喉が鳴ります牡蠣殻と

ゆあーん   ゆよーん   ゆやゆよん

屋外は真ッ闇   闇の闇

夜は劫々と更けまする

落下傘奴のノスタルヂアと

ゆあーん   ゆよーん   ゆやゆよん

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682874/sakasu at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Circus

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

Translated from the Japanese

There have been so many eras

So many wars fought in brown

There have been so many eras

So many quick winds of winter

There have been so many eras

But here, tonight, a party like no other

But here, tonight, a party like no other

From the highest beams of the circus tent

Hangs a single trapeze

So high that one can hardly see

Hands hang upside down

Below the soiled cotton canopy, he swings—

Baaaaack and fooooorth, back and forth

Yuyaaaaan yuyooooon, yuya yuyon

Nearby, white lights

Exhale cheap ribbon

The spectators are all sardines,

Oyster shell Adam’s apples rattle—

Baaaaack and fooooorth, back and forth

Yuyaaaaan yuyooooon, yuya yuyon

It is pitch-black outside, the darkest darkness,

The night deepens with each passing moment

Descending with a parachutist’s wistfulness—

Baaaaack and fooooorth, back and forth

Yuyaaaaan yuyooooon, yuya yuyon

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Jeffrey Angles.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682824/circus at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

汚れつちまつた悲しみに ......

By Nakahara Chūya

汚れつちまつた悲しみに

今日も小雪の降りかかる

汚れつちまつた悲しみに

今日も風さへ吹きすぎる

汚れつちまつた悲しみは

たとへば狐の革裘

汚れつちまつた悲しみは

小雪のかかつてちぢこまる

汚れつちまつた悲しみは

なにのぞむなくねがふなく

汚れつちまつた悲しみは

倦怠のうちに死を夢む

汚れつちまつた悲しみに

いたいたしくも怖気づき

汚れつちまつた悲しみに

なすところもなく日は暮れる ......

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682876/wu-retsuchimatsutabei-shimini at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

On This Bit of Soiled Sadness…

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

Translated from the Japanese

On this bit of soiled sadness

The flurries fall again today

Through this bit of soiled sadness

The wind blows again today

This bit of soiled sadness

Not unlike a foxling’s fur

This bit of soiled sadness

Catches snow, huddles and curls

This bit of soiled sadness

Has neither wishes nor desire

This bit of soiled sadness

Dreams of death in languor

This bit of soiled sadness

Tragic, it strikes me with fright

This bit of soiled sadness

Helpless, enveloped by night ...

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Jeffrey Angles.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682826/on-this-bit-of-soiled-sadness at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

骨

By Nakahara Chūya

ホラホラ、これが僕の骨だ、

生きてゐた時の苦労にみちた

あのけがらはしい肉を破つて、

しらじらと雨に洗はれ、

ヌツクと出た、骨の尖。

それは光沢もない、

ただいたづらにしらじらと、

雨を吸収する、

風に吹かれる、

幾分空を反映する。

生きてゐた時に、

これが食堂の雑踏の中に、

坐つてゐたこともある、

みつばのおしたしを食つたこともある、

と思へばなんとも可笑しい。

ホラホラ、これが僕の骨――

見てゐるのは僕？ 可笑しなことだ。

霊魂はあとに残つて、

また骨の処にやつて来て、

見てゐるのかしら？

故郷の小川のへりに、

半ばは枯れた草に立つて、

見てゐるのは、――僕？

恰度立札ほどの高さに、

骨はしらじらととんがつてゐる。

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682878/gu at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Bone

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

Translated from the Japanese

Look, look! This is my bone

Torn free of that filthy flesh

Filled with the sufferings of life

A bone washed white by rain

Tip protruding

It does not shine—

Pointlessly white

It soaks up rain

Is blown by wind

Reflects slivers of sky

While alive

This bone must have sat

In crowded cafeterias

Eaten boiled greens—

How strange that seems!

Look, look! This is my bone

Am I the one that sees? How odd ...

Does the soul remain

Return to the corpse

And dare to look?

Standing in half-dead grass

On the banks of a brook

In my hometown—is that me?

White and bare, the bone protrudes

The height of a signpost

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Jeffrey Angles.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682828/bone at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

曇天

By Nakahara Chūya

ある朝   僕は   空の   中に、

黒い   旗が   はためくを   見た。

はたはた   それは   はためいて   いたが、

音は   きこえぬ   高きが   ゆえに。

手繰り   下ろそうと   僕は   したが、

綱も   なければ   それも   叶わず、

旗は   はたはた   はためく   ばかり、

空の   奥処に   舞い入る   如く。

かかる   朝を   少年の   日も、

屡々   見たりと   僕は   憶う。

かの時は   そを   野原の   上に、

今はた   都会の   甍の   上に。

かの時   この時   時は   隔つれ、

此処と   彼処と   所は   異れ、

はたはた   はたはた   み空に   ひとり、

いまも   渝らぬ   かの   黒旗よ。

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682880/tan-tian at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

NAKAHARA CHŪYA | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Overcast Sky

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

Translated from the Japanese

one morning     I saw     a black flag

fluttering     up there     in the sky

the flag fluttered     back and forth     back and forth

inaudible     for it was     so high

I wanted     to reel     it down

but without     rope     how could I?

so the flag     just went     back and forth

dancing     in the depths     of the sky

I recall     as a boy     many times

looking up     those mornings     back a while

I saw one     that time     over fields

now     again     over city roof tiles

this time     and that time     are so far apart

and this place     and that place     aren’t the same

but black flag!     still you flutter     alone

back and forth     in the sky     unchanged!

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Jeffrey Angles.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682830/overcast-sky at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JEFFREY ANGLES | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Nakahara Chūya

Chūya is an essential part of the canon of modern Japanese poetry.

BY Jeffrey Angles

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

In every country, there are certain poets so popular that every young literature lover devours their work. In Japan, that poet is Nakahara Chūya—a brilliant, sentimental modernist who, despite dying from tuberculosis in 1937 at the age of thirty, is an essential part of the canon of modern Japanese poetry.

While writing tanka as a youngster, Chūya, as he is widely known, learned that by pressing up against poetic structure, working both within and against the bounds of meter and form, a poet could generate productive, dramatic tension. Although he turned from traditional verse to modernism in his twenties, Chūya diligently applied this lesson throughout his life’s work.

“Circus” was first written in 1929 and appears in Chūya’s second book of poems published posthumously in 1938. Now, it is among his most frequently anthologized poems. In it, one senses a young poet pushing against not only the formal constraints but also the increasingly repressive society of imperial Japan. It starts with a carefully policed metrical refrain acknowledging Japan’s military conquests, before veering into a freer description of an artist performing dangerous feats as darkness gathers outside. Chūya uses a seemingly made-up onomatopoeia, yuya yuyon, to represent the long, undulating arcs of a trapeze artist swinging dangerously over the crowd. Recent scholarship suggests that Chūya likely derived inspiration for this word from the songs Chinese children would sing when playing on swings, which takes on special resonance considering that Japan colonized Manchuria in 1931 (a couple of years after the first draft of this poem) then invaded all of eastern China in 1937 (the same year Chūya put together the manuscript for his second book, which includes this poem). In translating this work, one might be tempted to tame this odd expression into a more straightforward English substitute, but doing so would diminish the political overtones in this poem about artistic risk-taking, so relevant in our current moment.

Read the poems that this note is about: “Circus,” “On This Bit of Soiled Sadness…” “Bone,” and “Overcast Sky” by Nakahara Chūya.

Jeffrey Angles is a poet and translator of Japanese literature. His poetry collection Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (“My International Date Line”) (Shich sha, 2016) won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.

Read Full Biography

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Author

Nakahara Chūya

Nakahara Chūya is one of Japan’s most beloved twentieth-century poets—a modernist known for his melancholy, iconoclastic, and frequently avant-garde lyricism.

Poem

Circus

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

There have been so many eras

So many wars fought in brown

There have been so many eras

So many quick …

Poem

サーカス

By Nakahara Chūya

幾時代かがありまして

茶色い戦争ありました

幾時代かがありまして

冬は疾風吹きました

幾時代かがありまして

今夜此処での一と殷盛り

今夜此処での一と殷盛り

サーカス小屋は高い梁

そこに一つのブランコだ

見える…

Poem

On This Bit of Soiled Sadness…

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

On this bit of soiled sadness

The flurries fall again today

Through this bit of soiled sadness

The wind…

Poem

汚れつちまつた悲しみに ......

By Nakahara Chūya

汚れつちまつた悲しみに

今日も小雪の降りかかる

汚れつちまつた悲しみに

今日も風さへ吹きすぎる

汚れつちまつた悲しみは

たとへば狐の革裘

汚れつちまつた悲しみは

小雪のかかつてちぢこまる

汚れつ…

Poem

Bone

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

Look, look! This is my bone

Torn free of that filthy flesh

Filled with the sufferings of life

A bone washed…

Poem

骨

By Nakahara Chūya

ホラホラ、これが僕の骨だ、

生きてゐた時の苦労にみちた

あのけがらはしい肉を破つて、

しらじらと雨に洗はれ、

ヌツクと出た、骨の尖。

それは光沢もない、

ただいたづらにしらじらと、

雨を吸収する、

…

Poem

Overcast Sky

By Nakahara Chūya

Translated By Jeffrey Angles

one morning     I saw     a black flag

fluttering     up there     in the sky

the flag fluttered     back and forth     back…

Poem

曇天

By Nakahara Chūya

ある朝   僕は   空の   中に、

黒い   旗が   はためくを   見た。

はたはた   それは   はためいて   いたが、

音は   きこえぬ   高きが   ゆえに。

手繰り   下ろそうと   僕は   したが、

綱も   なければ   それも   叶…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1684848/on-translating-nakahara-chuya at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JACQUES J. RANCOURT | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Dear Sister Agnes,

By Jacques J. Rancourt

Can I still call you

Emily? Not long after

we last saw each other, I too changed

my name. Dropped T.J.

to take on my given name.

Dropped discerning the priesthood,

reading my morning scripture

and praying the rosary

each night by my bedside,

to discern dick. My life either way

would be spent

on my knees. I’m writing  you now

after all this time

because you also understand

some lines can’t be uncrossed. Because

that dark buzzed gym

where I kissed

your shoulder is the last artifact

from before

I still keep.

And because I wonder if, for you,

too, Sister, the past

now lies parallel

beside you in furrowed rows.

There are times, the sun

gutting the spines

of redwoods, pooling on a heap

of ash-laced dirt, yes,

or holding my husband

on his worst days

when none of it survives,

when it seems possible

to have never had a youth,

to have emerged fully formed,

purely this. I don’t

turn back often, though I did

go to your convent once

to look for your face

among the wimples. A seagull

wandered in, its screeches

flanking the altar.

The marbled saints

all leered. I left a quarter

in the donation box,

but lit no candles, said no

intentions. I didn’t know

which of us

to pray for. And in that dotted light,

the saints’ expressions

all changed. Teej

you used to call me.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682832/dear-sister-agnes at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JACQUES J. RANCOURT | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

For the Cult-Themed Party

By Jacques J. Rancourt

I dressed as a stag: headpiece

of antlers, fabric flowers

hot-glued to a harness, my ass

hanging out of a jock.

Someone in a white tunic said

I looked straight out of

Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.

Someone else said, More like DeBussy.

While some took Molly and enough

Viagra to counteract the Molly

and some busied themselves

in the woods gathering brush

for the bonfire, a man I had grown

to love took my picture

among the hedges and saplings

the laurel had sprung up against.

Wine-drunk, we napped that afternoon

in the casita, my palm resting

on his belly, rising and falling

to the slow flute of  his breathing—

whatever he exhaled,

I breathed in. We didn’t fuck

or even kiss. And through the skylight,

the light changed from chamomile

to lavender, from lavender to violet,

the muffled drunken yowls outside

persisting. We couldn’t pretend

to be asleep much longer. Even in Nijinsky’s ballet,

before its graphic depiction of desire,

a faun first wakes center stage on a set

adorned with white paper trees

and a single shaft of  light. Even in spring,

his hair still cradled

under my chin, I longed for spring.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682834/for-the-cult-themed-party at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ROCHELLE HURT | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Carolee Schneemann—Interior Scroll (1975)

By Rochelle Hurt

filmed/photographed performance

[all my exes agree i’m too sensitive. inside i’m keeping track of slights on one long receipt, a diaristic indulgence. ask me your score and i’ll open my legs. vulnerability is in. Schneemann made this at thirty-six, which was my first question because i’m still unlearning that youth is worth for women. i wanted to measure myself against her flesh, and her stance invites it. to have a stance at all is to be called a cunt so why not serve yourself. all this focus on the body, these primitive techniques—it’s what they use against us: this video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service. the American public is very sensitive. but certain films argue for their context. interpreted too literally, my body is my context. gender scores the surface. Schneemann called herself the cunt mascot on the men’s art team. her boyfriend took the pictures of this performance as she pulled the scroll from her vagina—why does this feel disappointing? sometimes i take my body off but then somebody puts it back on for me. holds out the sleeves so gentlemanly. we are fond of you. you are charming. in the pocket is my long receipt but i don’t whip it out immediately. my cunt is cluttered with problems i’d like you to see. ask me your score and i’ll sit on your face. see if you can find your name.]

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682836/carolee-schneemann-interior-scroll-1975 at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ROCHELLE HURT | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Jenny Holzer—DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG (1978)

By Rochelle Hurt

text projected on LED console, from “TRUISMS” series

[as jumping from a plane. easier—a bridge. as tripping on a shoelace. as blinking your eyes. as breathing. as talking to ghosts. as dreaming.

in the end, my grandfather would wake running after his brother who died in the war. later, his mother. he couldn’t walk anymore.

between jumping and falling is a shred of awareness.

maybe the easiest thing about dying is shedding gravity.

when you’re dying, a parade of platitudes overtakes you. god’s plan implies nobody’s death is an accident. or even manslaughter.

in the US, dying of cancer costs just over $100,000 a year, on average.

cancer at twenty-two was a mindfuck i’m still processing. i wasn’t dying, though everyone thought i was. it made them stand either closer to or further from me, depending on their upbringing.

when you die, your age will be the most reliable indicator of your family’s grief. the correlation is inverse, obviously.

when you tell people you’ve had cancer, they often look like they’ve just eaten something spoiled.

my dad cried when my sister told him i had cancer, which is why she was doing the telling. family was warned to not talk about it with me. i’ve spent my life looking for quiet exit strategies.

you may one day wonder if you should place a pillow over the face of a loved one struggling to die.

it’s primarily on religious grounds that assisted suicide is frowned upon. interference and whatnot.

whose body is this? ALS patient Sue Rodriguez asked the Canadian parliament in the nineties. not hers, they decided. she found some pills anyway.

the US followed suit, leaving it to the states. it’s legal in ten, but none of the ones i’ve lived in. Florida calls it manslaughter.

here, much is said about the unborn’s rights, but the right to die is not a given.

once i got cancer, i stopped describing my depression as a kind of cancer. wanting specifically to live felt oddly new.

once i was asked what i would do with one day left to live and i said, sit. i would sit under a tree.

after surgery, you leave the hospital in a chair, sitting. after dying, you leave in a box, lying.

after i drank the radioactive poison they gave me, i walked out through the hospital lobby and down the street to my house. it felt like the strangest thing, walking.

if everyone thinks you’re dying, you must be.

when you’re dying, you look at your hands and find air between your fingers where there was previously nothing. you thought nothingness was hard—

when you’re dead, nothing is easy.]

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682838/jenny-holzer-dying-should-be-as-easy-as-falling-off-a-log-1978 at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

ROCHELLE HURT | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Bharti Kher—Confess (2010)

By Rochelle Hurt

wood (bridal suite), bindis, and light bulb

[if you marry your confession, you can live alone inside it. no priest behind the window. no wife or husband. the walls glitter with eyes and all of them are yours, a palimpsest of witness. how many does it take to see this through? the hardest confession i ever made was i don’t love you. i have confessed inside a car, velour under my thighs, windows up. i have confessed in a polished oak alcove. i’ve confessed on a couch ten minutes before slamming the door. once i confessed in a red vinyl booth, the paper napkin in my lap stained with vinegar. in bed. in arms. in handcuffs. it’s the state of being enclosed that compels you: like womb, like ring, like mausoleum. here to stay is a threat in one box, in another a promise. the lighting’s the same: from the ceiling, the future hangs to interrogate you. every confession unties a lie and says, begin. listen: the hardest confession i never made was i love you, and this is the one i live in. no wife or husband. to marry your confession, you don’t have to love it, but you’ll learn to.]

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682840/bharti-kher-confess-2010 at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

RUBY HANSEN MURRAY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰

By Ruby Hansen Murray

In school I learned to say Koran, like I learned to say Osage.

When I hear Qur’an, I understand I am closer to truth.

When I hear 𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰, I know I am closer to the mottled eagle

sailing low over the ferry sliding across the slough, closer

to the bowl of nest in a cottonwood, a white-headed parent above.

𐓐 looks like a talon, 𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰 the sound of an eagle rising.

I am 𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰 chasing an osprey. 𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰 curled beak tearing fish.

I am salmon in translucent green.

When Bill says, 𐓀𐒰͘𐒼𐒰𐓆𐒰 𐓈𐓂𐒷 𐓇𐒼𐓂͘𐓇𐓈𐒰? and I understand, a blaze.

In his eighties, Mogri murmurs 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 𐒻𐒷,

says you—you can’t think of it like English. There’s

a different concept in Osage. When he says, you—

you all are doing real good, he holds the broken in me.

Notes:

This poem appeared in print under the title 𐓂𐓐𐓈𐒰. The spelling has been corrected for the online publication at the poet’s request.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1683147/orhda at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

RUBY HANSEN MURRAY | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Lillie in the Reign of Terror

By Ruby Hansen Murray

Lillie Maggie Morrell Burkhart, a relative, married Byron Burkhart,

brother of  Ernest Burkhart, who was convicted of killing Osages.

Mine to walk to the cemetery,

bring flowers to my sisters.

Mine to walk through Fairfax ignoring the glances,

whispers. Mine to live alone,

hear the strong wind in the live oaks.

Mine to gauge the green light, off color of tornadoes,

the dark of the storm cellar.

Mine is to dream. Mine to write letters,

visit the prison in El Reno,

hire a maid, a man to cut brush.

Mine to make an arbor, hire the cooks for a feast,

hold a spring dance.

Mine to invite my extended family,

and sit by the fire if no one comes.

Mine to wait until Byron is home, welcome him,

ride around with him. Mine the warmth in my bed.

Mine to hold my head up when I go to town, to live beyond gossip.

Mine to honor the old ways, to preserve the broadcloth,

order new clothes.

Mine to ignore the 𐒻͘𐓇𐓈𐒰𐓐𐒻 in my house, the hair oil on the pillow,

Mine is to live in the Osage, remember my relatives

and never show weakness—

Mine is to live.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682842/lillie-in-the-reign-of-terror at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

GEORGIO RUSSELL | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Eloquence

By Georgio Russell

I turn your ear, now transformed,

to the imperfection of sacred things.

—Jay Wright,“What Is Beautiful”

Within this simple chapel, located near the navel

of the little clinic, the walls are all the white

of paper before a voice finds the keeping

flesh of it—they carry nothing except the quiet

of Christ, bystander on a bronze cross above

the only door. In the middle pew, you are a hyphen

seated between your parents, the murmur

of one prayer beside the crashing

of another. On the aisle side, your father

hunches over, laced fingers raised to his face,

the undertow motion of his lips

like Sunday decorum, while the ballyhoo

psalm of your mother vibes a violent tone.

Inside some other room, fluorescent bulbs burn

their focus on the stillness of your brother,

the boy intubated on the table, brought across the island

by sirens after fainting, the foam and seizing

panic in the hot blow of a schoolday noon.

In the jolt of things, you are just a child in the raw

womb of this chapel, head squeezed

between your mother’s bosom and sleeve.

She rocks you in the pew, nose drool in the groove

above her monologue, her perfume minting over

the bite of  bleach and lime that shines

the tiles. Here, in this chapel, you begin to listen

to the faith they call from the core,

a bone grammar, the spirit piping and hoarse.

You tune yourself to this iambic:

your father’s secret pleas—your mother’s fluent

hallelujah booms. Here, in this chapel, you try

to catch every breath they shape to power.

You remain patient in this business, casting

your net, learning by their stanzas

how to speak the holy down, a new vocation

waiting when you exit, lungs full

of phrases that will fail as well, the fodder God will need

to keep decay at bay. Already, your own

words cower in the wound

your mouth makes now. The perfect order

becomes apparent, then it fades

like echoes from the walls and once

the heavy clears your throat, you ask to see the body

simply, cleaned of all deceit, a request

you will repeat forever on pages the shade of salt.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682844/eloquence at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

BRUNO DARÍO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

En la sala de velación: Septiembre

By bruno darío

Translated from the Spanish

Barrí toda mi casa, y la encontré otra. En los rincones había otros más pequeños que la máscara de polvo de la percepción nublaba. La mesa se convirtió en espejo.

Las ventanas de mi sentido están abiertas y pasa la voz de las piedras que hace sonar descalza la corriente. Se hace manifiesta mi existencia, y hervir agua hoy, desnudo, es lo mejor que pudo haber pasado. Entonces el ruido de un motor colorea el horizonte y recuerdo que no estoy tan lejos del imperio nocivo y su industria [de]capitalista.

Desde hace un par de meses averiguo una estructura de seda construida a lo ancho de una esquina. Aunque me fijé en cada pasadizo, no he tenido el placer de conocer a la creadora. Antier soñé que clavaba sus quelíceros en mi entrepierna, paralizando al instante mi corazón. Sin pulso ya, sin miedo y con todavía la araña colgada del muslo—como predijiste—, salía de las cobijas para caminar por una ciudad en ruinas, donde no había casas ni edificios, solamente restos de avenidas e intactos espectaculares anunciando todo tipo de productos. Al percatarme de que vestía un mameluco, desperté.

Arañas que comen su propia seda como sustituto alimenticio pues tiene una base prote(i)(í)(n)(i)ca. La ingeniería de tejidos estudia las telas en busca de soluciones regenerativas. La humanidad no escatima en cuanto a potenciar su estadía y creo que arrasará con todo a su paso para prolongarla. De susto a permanecer te escribo, atrapada en la seda comestible que ha tramado el engranaje. Me resisto. Bato las alas y zumbo en desespero: me sofoca más la tela y más me atrapa. Tampoco es opción quedarse quieta. ¿Cómo permanecer en guerra sin perder la ternura?

No creas que no te escucho roncar desde aquí.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682846/en-la-sala-de-velacion-septiembre at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

BRUNO DARÍO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Funeral home viewing room: September

By bruno darío

Translated By Kit Schluter

I swept my house and found another. In every corner was another smaller corner, which the dust mask of perception had clouded out. The table turned into a mirror.

The windows of my senses are open and in comes the voice of the stones that make the current sound barefoot. My existence manifests itself, and boiling water today while naked was the best thing that could have happened. Then the sound of a motor colors the horizon and I remember that I’m not so far from the noxious empire and its [de]capitalist industry.

For a few months now I’ve been keeping my eye on a silk structure built in a corner. I’ve looked in every nook and cranny, but I still haven’t had the pleasure of meeting its maker. The day before yesterday I dreamt she was driving her chelicerae into my crotch, instantly paralyzing my heart. With-out pulse or fear, and with the spider still hanging from my thigh—just as you predicted—I got out from under my sheets to wander around a city in ruins, where there were no houses or buildings, just the remnants of avenues and intact billboards announcing all sorts of products. Just when I noticed I was wearing onesie pajamas, I woke up.

Spiders that eat their own silk as a food substitute because it has a prote(i/a)nbase. Tissue engineers study spiderwebs in search of regenerative solutions. Humanity spares nothing to empower its stint, and I think it would level everything in its path to make it last a little longer. I write you out of a  fear of lasting, caught in the edible silk woven by the gears. I’m fighting back. I beat my wings and buzz in desperation: more webbing suffocates me, more of it entraps me. But staying still isn’t an option, either. How can I remain at war without losing my tenderness?

Don’t think I can’t hear you snoring from here.

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Kit Schluter.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682882/funeral-home-viewing-room-september at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

BRUNO DARÍO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Intenciones de respirar [“Ni un día más allá la maleza"]

By bruno darío

Translated from the Spanish

Ni un día más allá la maleza cubrirá nuestros monumentos. La arquitectura reemplazada por otra furiosa. Envueltos los símbolos patrios en lianas, los cables de flores y de musgo colmados. Garras las plantas. Gran avalancha apaga las mañas. Tienes fuerza, lo sé: conoces temblar.

Es diciembre. No he escrito

más que en los muros de este lugar tan

huido y ni rayándolo conózcolo.

Niñas y niños agitan sus alcancías. Sueltos los fuegos de las vacaciones, cantan La rama:

Soon full moon & winter solstice,

perfect time to take a selfie;

through a dance slips lightness

and purity with all your money.

Hospeda tu rostro a la luz

cambiante de estas fechas;

verde, azul, rojos postres son tus

ramas, relámpagos, venas.

...

Si se sueña cuando está el sol por ocultarse, el atardecer parece un tapiz arrancado y las montañas dan la impresión de ser un detrás ... Una espesura ... La negra pared fundamental.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682848/intenciones-de-respirar at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

BRUNO DARÍO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Intentions to breathe [“Before even one day has passed"]

By bruno darío

Translated By Kit Schluter

Before even one day has passed in the beyond, the weeds will cover our monuments. Our architecture replaced by another more furious. National symbols wrapped in ivy, the power lines covered in flowers and moss. Plants like claws. A great avalanche buries our cunning. You’re strong, I can tell: you’re no stranger to trembling.

It’s December. I haven’t written

except for on the walls of this place

so fled, and not even by scribbling on it

do I recognize it.

Girls and boys rattle their piggy banks. Having set loose the fires of vacation, they sing “The Branch”:

Soon full moon & winter solstice,

perfect time to take a selfie;

through a dance slips lightness

and purity with all your money.

Your face hosts this season’s

changing light;

green, blue, cakes of  red

are your branches, lightning, veins.

...

If one dreams while the sun is about to hide away, the sunset looks like a torn-out tapestry and the mountains give the impression of being a back-ground ... A thickness ... The fundamental black wall.

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Kit Schluter.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682850/intentions-to-breathe at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

BRUNO DARÍO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Intenciones de respirar [“fantasía"]

By bruno darío

Translated from the Spanish

FANTASÍA

(POEMA DE AMOR IMPROVISO)

Quiero acompañarte

en la aventura de la maestría.

¡Cuánto me gustaría

nuestro amor antónimo de arte!

Dejar academias y coloquios;

que respirar nos otorgue regalías ...

¡Despegar en un avión a Tokyo

o a donde tú digas...!

Fuera de salones y apatías;

de esos muros que limitan las pasiones,

que complican y atrofian con sanciones

como un tren prisionero de la vía.

Quiero agitar contigo el cielo,

mas interfiere un murmuro llano.

¡Si yo contigo he sido malo,

me lo cobra la vida en pañuelo!

¡Vida!: ¡sucede!

Je suis l’espace où je suis.

Algo me picó en el río. Duele, pero no me molesta. ¿En qué parte me picó? En el río. No, en qué parte del cuerpo. En ésa.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682852/intenciones-de-respirar-fantasia at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

BRUNO DARÍO | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Intentions to breathe [“fantasia"]

By bruno darío

Translated By Kit Schluter

FANTASIA

(IMPROVISED LOVE POEM)

I want to accompany you

on the adventure of mastery.

How I’d love

our love, the antonym of art!

So much for academies and talks;

let breathing give us royalties ...

Take off in a plane to Tokyo

or wherever you say...!

Beyond classrooms and apathies;

beyond those walls that delimit passions,

complicating and atrophying with sanctions

as a train is prisoner of the rails.

I want to shake the sky with you,

but a plain murmur interferes.

If I’ve wronged you

life will make me pay in handkerchiefs!

Life!: happen!

Je suis l’espace où je suis.

Something bit me in the river. It hurts, but I don’t mind. Where’d it bite me? In the river. No, I mean, what body part. The river.

Notes:

Read the translator’s note by Kit Schluter.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682854/intentions-to-breathe-fantasia at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

KIT SCHLUTER | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating bruno darío

airsickness does not seek to “cure” this condition, but instead teaches us to stare our fate in the face—and to laugh in, to spit on, to kiss this face.

BY Kit Schluter

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

By the time of his death at twenty-nine from brain cancer, bruno darío (1993-2022)—always fully lowercase—had already left a surprising and indelible mark on Mexican poetry with Lantana; or, the indissoluble exhalation, a trilogy comprised of the three full-length books he published in his lifetime: feast, fright; airsickness; and raze.

By turns sardonic and lyrical, amorous and irreverent, Lantana centers loosely on the relationship of a young man (the Inconsolable) and an older woman who unexpectedly takes her own life (Lantana/Anfitriona). Across the three books, darío moves between registers and genres: soliloquies from people, places, and things; the Inconsolable’s notes, poems, and letters; the discourses of Lantana’s decomposing corpse as gravity pulls her deeper into the soil.

The poems included here are examples of the Inconsolable’s letters from airsickness. Penned to various figures in his life, the letters are philosophical, nasty, funny, disaffected—full of both life and death. They overflow with wordplay and experiments that rub up against the writer’s frank attempt to articulate a clear, critical vision of contemporary life.

Once, while we were editing these translations together, I asked bruno what the concept of “airsickness” meant to him. He said it had to do with the particular condition of alienation inherent to our times. He provided an example: the very air we breathe is not only increasingly polluted with carcinogens, but it also courses with invisible cellular and Wi-Fi signals pumped out of the gadgets that sever our connections to each other as humans, as animals. It is a sickness carried, too, by the particles of the last breaths of all those who die every day in disappearances, femicides, and capital-fueled genocide. It is pervasive. I wonder: can it be cured?

airsickness does not seek to “cure” this condition, but instead teaches us to stare our fate in the face—and to laugh in, to spit on, to kiss this face. Lantana, on the whole, is like nothing else I have ever read, and is among my very favorite works of Latin American literature in the new millennium.

Kit Schluter wrote Cartoons (City Lights, 2024) and translated His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal (New Directions, 2022). He lives in Mexico City and coordinates design at Nightboat Books.

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Author

bruno darío

bruno darío was author of the trilogy Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation, which Ugly Duckling Press will publish in June.

Poem

En la sala de velación: Septiembre

By bruno darío

Barrí toda mi casa, y la encontré otra. En los rincones había otros más pequeños que la máscara de polvo…

Poem

Funeral home viewing room: September

By bruno darío

Translated By Kit Schluter

I swept my house and found another. In every corner was another smaller corner, which the dust mask …

Poem

Intenciones de respirar [“Ni un día más allá la maleza"]

By bruno darío

Ni un día más allá la maleza cubrirá nuestros monumentos. La arquitectura reemplazada por otra furiosa…

Poem

Intentions to breathe [“Before even one day has passed"]

By bruno darío

Translated By Kit Schluter

Before even one day has passed in the beyond, the weeds will cover our monuments. Our architecture …

Poem

Intenciones de respirar [“fantasía"]

By bruno darío

fantasía

(poema de amor improviso)

Quiero acompañarte

en la aventura de la maestría.

¡Cuánto me gustar…

Poem

Intentions to breathe [“fantasia"]

By bruno darío

Translated By Kit Schluter

I want to accompany you

on the adventure of mastery.

How I’d love

our love, the antonym of art!

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1685789/on-translating-bruno-dario at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

JANE ZWART | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

All my life I was a bride married to amazement

By Jane Zwart

After Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes”

When death comes, final and novel—

the trick cul-de-sac or burst dam, a door

that opening erases or shutting disappears—

I want to watch the filmstrip once more.

I want to see the caterpillar, his whole body

a fat neck, rolling hills and horripilation.

I want to remember how, every time

he dropped from some leaf to my arm,

we appalled each other. I want to remember

how, every time, astonishment

made us the same.

When death comes, I want to watch,

reel-to-reel, my unrealized fears

yielding to what I never thought to dread:

meningitis, oily rags.

I want to flip back to the times

my name came up lucky

in the raffle of who-gets-to-see-herons.

All my life I was a bride married to amazement:

every sickness an affront, every peach

a geode. All my life: bowled over by every hell—

fresh, stale, it didn’t matter—

and all my life blown about, a feather

on the breath of God.

When it is over, I want to say: it was a requited love.

But probably, even then, I will not know

whether I have passed my life as surprise’s adept

or her dupe.

Probably, even then, I will only

be sure of  falling asleep

beside my strange bedfellow, strange.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1682856/all-my-life-i-was-a-bride-married-to-amazement at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

HARD FEELINGS

- On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe

- On Neediness: Midnight Chimes

- On Despair: It’s All a Charade

ELAINE KAHN | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe

My writing was not more important to me than my wish to have a family. And this is the well from which much of my shame flowed.

BY Elaine Kahn

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

Art by Tim Bouckley.

What I hated most about pregnancy wasn’t back pain or weight gain or even gestational diabetes. It wasn’t the nonstop medical appointments or the strangers asking to touch my belly. It certainly wasn’t nausea, which I experienced only fleetingly. Pregnancy is a parade of indignities, but the hardest to endure was the shame I felt. I wanted to have a baby and everybody knew it, just by looking at me. Heaped atop the discomfort of my exposed ambition was the possibility that, should I miscarry, this, too, would be public.

Choosing to have a baby betrays a kind of hope: a commitment to the future, to life, and, on some level, to banality. I am not above child-rearing, my pregnancy told the world, quite accurately. I was a writer, but perhaps not that kind of writer. My writing was not more important to me than my wish to have a family. And this is the well from which much of my shame flowed. Inside me was a yearning so powerful, so basic, that it dominated my every instinct. I, who had willingly abandoned nearly all of life’s landmarks for the sake of my art, was not willing to abandon being a mom. Instead, I was casting aside almost everything I recognized about myself, everything I had built, all for something that nearly everyone I’d gone to high school with had achieved a decade earlier.

If you had asked me how I felt during my pregnancy, I probably would have said, “Great! No morning sickness! Hiking four miles every day!” Those closest to me knew I was battling severe anxiety, but I don’t think I ever admitted to anyone how ashamed I was—ashamed of how badly I wanted a baby and how long I had waited to have one. I was ashamed of the realization that, after years of insisting being an artist doesn’t make you special, being an artist had made me special—in the sense that it had shaped the choices I made, the life I had constructed, my identity. Where would all that go when I was caring for an infant full-time? I’m familiar with the countless examples of successful artists with children—many of them are close friends—but, frankly, I wasn’t sure I would be one of them. My writing didn’t necessarily seem significant enough to compete with a child.

Let me be clear: I am not of the opinion that having a child is an inherently good or important thing to do. I am not attempting to position myself as some self-sacrificing maternal figure, setting aside my own needs in order to raise a baby. On the contrary, I wanted to be a mother. In fact, I have often worried—and felt deep shame—over what felt to me like a mostly selfish choice, made in pursuit of my own pleasure and fulfillment above all else. As Cody-Rose Clevidence puts it in their book Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night:

oxytocin is released in both your brain and your dog’s brain when you look at each other. personally, I think it’s unethical to have kids, that there is so much pain in the world that it is unconscionable to bring another conscious being into it. but, I don’t speak for the morals of others.

I read this, and a part of me agrees. On the other hand, as my husband Robert said when I aired this concern, “ethics have nothing to do with it; it’s natural.” Can I quote my own poem here? What drives me/is baseless/and therefore/indisputable. That’s what Robert means: not that procreation is essential, or even innate; rather, to those struck by it, the yearning to have a child doesn’t occur in the realm of reason or justice but in the realm of death and awe. Some things just are. Still, I would be much less embarrassed if I were writing an essay about my willingness to abandon my writing career in order to become an organizer, or a public-school teacher, or, I don’t know, a gardener.

My daughter, Ramona, is now eighteen months old. Being a mom is, without question, the best thing to ever have happened to me. I am happier and more relaxed now. Motherhood has even, inexplicably, cured me of the insomnia that has plagued me since I was a child. Still, my writing life has suffered. In the first year of Ramona’s life, I wrote one poem. It was about her birth, a highly traumatic and very nearly fatal event that left me in the hospital for a month. I would like to say that being so close to death finally rid me of my shame, but the opposite is true. I sent my friends text updates from the Maternal Fetal Care Unit: “if you tell me ‘I’m sorry’ I’m going to stop speaking to you.” My illness seemed the final, totalizing proof of my humiliating desperation: I was willing to give up everything to have a baby.

People say that if you shine a light on what you’re ashamed of, it will have less power over you. That is definitely not what happened over the course of writing this essay! Instead, the more I examined my shame, the more it consumed me. I became envious of my students, whose poetry I encourage and guide. I made cutting comments to my husband—a writer himself—and then rejected his attempts to make space for me to work. Every publication announcement I saw felt like an accusation. I was being choked by the pettiness of my own emotional life. Is this the cost of motherhood? I have always been irked by the suggestion that one should suffer for their art. Why am I so accepting of the idea that I should suffer for my child? At this point, I suppose I’d be too ashamed not to.

This essay is part of “Hard Feelings,” an essay series of poets writing about ugly emotions.

Elaine Kahn is the author of Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020) and Women in Public (City Lights, 2015). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Poetry Field School.

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WILL HARRIS | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Neediness: Midnight Chimes

What other kind of writer puts so much stock in the quasi-religious notion of a calling or a vocation?

BY Will Harris

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

Art by Tim Bouckley.

That particular November 2nd was ninety years since W.B. Yeats wrote “All Souls’ Night.” My friend Theo and I marked the occasion by staying up into the small hours, writing our own poems to the dead. We were about twenty years old, living in university housing, sitting on the scratchy carpet of Theo’s bedroom. We had a bottle of wine and two mugs, but no “long glasses brimmed with muscatel.” Around midnight, I went to check my phone and heard a sound like a fork being scraped across stone. It was probably a loose floorboard, someone else in the house getting in. But until the toilet light clicked on, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a ghost.

In Yeats’s poem, midnight chimes, and he calls on the ghosts of two former friends (William Thomas Horton and MacGregor Mathers) and an old maybe-lover (Florence Emery). “A ghost may come,” he says, “to drink from the wine-breath/While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.” I used to love this poem almost entirely because of that image of dead spirits siphoning wine from the breath of the living. It encapsulated what I wanted to believe in, at an age when I was eager to believe in anything: namely, that poets don’t write as such. They commune, they channel, they receive dictation.

This conception is central to the poet’s neediness. What other kind of writer puts so much stock in the quasi-religious notion of a calling or a vocation? You can’t choose to be a poet; you have to be chosen, called upon by some force outside of yourself. As a result, you are always watching, waiting, anxiously hoping you’ll get the chance to write again.

Neediness is both a feature of poems and a characteristic of those who write them. Paul Celan calls poems “lonely,” a quality often, though not always, interchangeable with neediness. Novels are self-sufficient—cutting through the waves like cruise ships—whereas the poem, Celan continues, “intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.” That needy repetition of needs makes the point for him.

It’s significant that in “All Souls’ Night,” Yeats doesn’t necessarily get through to the spirits he addresses. His estranged friend Mathers, an “arrogant” ghost, won’t appear. Yeats says of him: “He had much industry at setting out,/Much boisterous courage, before loneliness/Had driven him crazed.” Commenting on another person’s “crazed” loneliness seems a bit much when you’re the one summoning ghosts at midnight and getting peeved at their indifference. But this only illustrates the neediness—the unreasonable desire to speak and be spoken back to and affirmed—that animates Yeats’s poem.

I had come to a halt the year before that All Souls’ Night on the carpet. I don’t know how else to put it. Maybe I’d experienced something similar before. I largely kept to myself during my teen years, though, so those moods would have gone off like underwater detonations. Now at university, surrounded by others, I was self-conscious about the force of my emotions. I knew something was wrong. When I failed to hand in another assignment, I told the professor I was stuck, like there was a Lego jammed in my internal mechanism.

Still, I tried. I spent hours in my room writing and rewriting the same sentence. Something was surfacing, a raw aloneness and grief I hadn’t let myself feel before. Its effect was immobilizing. The only thing that still moved, just about, was poetry. I read and wrote poems constantly; they took on the transferred weight of whatever else I was feeling. Poems absorbed it all. However small or hermetically sealed they seemed, they simulated a connection with others. Two weeks before Celan’s death by suicide, he wrote to his friend Ilana Shmueli, “when I read my poems, they grant me, momentarily, the possibility to exist, to stand.” I think that’s because poems are vehicles built to express neediness.

Whether the material of the poem is generated by direct address to a you or, as with Yeats, channels the spirits of the dead, there is a sense of bare tendrils reaching outward. Neediness is an ugly emotion in part because it gets overshadowed by more respectable ugly emotions such as anxiety. Anxiety, writes Sianne Ngai, has “a certain epistemological cachet.” Neediness, on the other hand, is more abject, associated with embarrassing traits like codependency in a romantic partnership or clinginess in a friendship.

But there is another way to see it.

If a specific wish lies behind neediness—maybe not one that could be fulfilled—it is the fantasy of psychic porousness, of minds laid open. The corollary in speech would be a language holding the possibility of total understanding, which renders speech itself unnecessary. Celan’s work, despite its perceived obscurity, strains toward this condition. A short poem titled “To Stand” echoes the language of his letter to Shmueli but in more ambivalent terms. A contradictory neediness runs through it: there’s the desire (as translated by Pierre Joris) to stand “for-no-one-and-nothing” while also to be “for you/alone.” He then closes with the image of a room “without/language” which cannot, by definition, be entered into by the poem.

Every feeling contains its opposite. To be needy is also to fantasize about being self-reliant, islanded, never in need. Of course, that makes it easier to shut out the needs of others—to regard them as separate from your own. But writing poems isn’t like that. As Celan said elsewhere, poems are a “making toward something.” Back in Theo’s room on All Souls’ Night, I was needy. As much as I wanted to be “for-no-one-and-nothing,” every part of me was directed toward a you. The poem “intends another, needs this other.” That was the first time I understood what it means to write. I was sitting with a friend; it was between night and morning, then and now. Waves of laughter and sadness passed through us. We inhabited a shared, transitive state, writing by the glare of a desk light, looking earnestly out of the window, waiting for something—someone—to respond.

This essay is part of “Hard Feelings,” an essay series of poets writing about ugly emotions.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. His debut poetry book, Rendang (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second book of poems, Brother Poem (Wesleyan University Press), was published in 2023. Harris has collaborated with the artist Aisha Farr and co-facilitates the Southbank New Poets Collective. He and...

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This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1682888/on-neediness-midnight-chimes at Jun 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM EDT.

RICHARD HELL | JUN 28, 2025, 7:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Despair: It’s All a Charade

If you can describe it, you must not be knowing it.

BY Richard Hell

Originally Published: June 02, 2025

Art by Tim Bouckley.

Despair is almost indescribably excruciating; if you can describe it, you must not be knowing it. Furthermore, it’s pathetic and embarrassing, which adds to the difficulty. The condition precludes any but mechanical action; even mental activity within it is minimal and repetitive. A writer can only gingerly pull up an abyss-flap and steal a glimpse, for art’s sake. (Are we despair yet?)

For me despair is a blot in which anything that could be felt as a path either goes nowhere or is trivially circular, the way the universe is curved, so that there’s no way out, only an elliptical looping ... (It’s said that the ellipse is the most common shape in the universe.) Life is radically circumscribed, and much is impossible to know: not difficult, but impossible, and always will be. The experience is of purest helplessness and hopelessness. (And those who would deride one as weak for succumbing were also born with their own temperamental “weaknesses.”) Think of the guilt of death camp survivors, nth level despair. As much as anything that guilt comes from knowing that one’s own survival had nothing to do with virtue, and one’s susceptibility to suicide also follows from having been exposed for months and years to the infinite cruelty of ordinary people, not excluding oneself.

For me, despair, to the best of my recollection, results typically from finding that my foundational assumptions, even ones so deep as to not be conscious prior, are illusory, incorrect: meaningless delusions. It’s disorienting to the extent of the concept of the abyss, an infinite location that is unlocated, within which the absence of orientation is so complete as to undermine existence altogether. One realizes not only that there’s no meaning, but also no possibility of comprehension of the simplest phenomenon. We’ll never know anything; we’ll only be manipulated by our petty, strained predilections and illusions, and this abysmal stasis is the most complete comprehension of reality of which one is capable, the deepest profundity one can ever know.

A great poem that treats this condition, or a variety of it, is the sixteen-line “To Himself,” by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), as translated by Jonathan Galassi, which begins:

Now you’ll rest forever,

worn-out heart. The ultimate illusion

that I thought was eternal died. It died.

I see not just the hope

but the desire for loved illusions

is done for us. Be still forever.

Despair is the most private form of unhappiness. Talking about it, to the extent possible, unlike most negative emotions, doesn’t dispel or dilute it whatsoever, but only annoys and bores a listener and shames and embarrasses the speaker. It’s a tradition in Christianity that despair is the only sin that is not forgiven. It’s a special province of poets possibly because it’s so private and damning.

The renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in a letter to Mike Warvarovsky dated May 25, 1969:

Neurophysiology shows what poetry and philosophy have always known: that we are—in a very fundamental sense—automata, reflex-machines; and also that we are composite. Knowing that we are necessarily passive and composite, we can then make ourselves, for daily purposes, active and unified. But there is no “soul” and no “will”—these are fictions, universal fictions, like the Garden of Eden.

Somehow these realizations didn’t seem to dent Sacks’s beautiful cheer, or generous performance of cheer, but being a puppet can be depressing.

All of our struggles not only fail to stamp us on the universe, they’re dictated by the universe. We’re merely the local link in that chain that’s “conscious.” It’s all a charade. The “I” is a fiction. And so is everyone you “love.” They’re merely experience processors more or less compatible with oneself. Even many of our various mental, psychological, and physical systems are practically independent of each other (we’re “composite”) and often thereby seemingly inconsistent. There’s no one there.

When I was young, I wondered why I seemed to be more sad than other people, more hopeless. I think the feelings were mostly of loss and of inadequacy. My father died suddenly when I was seven, and I always rejected the thought, now and then ventured by my sister or mother or someone, that his death had some unrecognized, damaging effect on me. I resented the suggestion that I was subject to that kind of random alteration from without. But I’ve long since understood that temperament is largely biological and involuntarily learned: “reflexive,” as Sacks put it. We’re puppets, and nature is indifferent to us.

I recently underwent an episode of despair. It was triggered by a set of ordinary occurrences within a few days that added up to completely confusing me about where I stood in relation to people I respected and had thought respected me. At least I think that’s what it was. I lay in bed in the dark in the middle of the night desperately trying to work my way out of this hole, mentally writhing beside my sleeping girlfriend. I remember wishing I could scream. I don’t know how long I internally groaned and twisted there before something surprising happened. It occurred to me that my girlfriend and I could have sex. She was warm and smelled good and she welcomed being touched by me. Sex solves everything, I thought, amazed. Good sex does. We “made” “love.” All my problems disappeared. How depressing is that?

This essay is part of “Hard Feelings,” an essay series of poets writing about ugly emotions.

Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers in 1949 in Lexington, Kentucky, where he was raised. At 17 he dropped out of high school and moved alone to New York City. There he wrote and published poems and pamphlets for five years until, in 1972, he changed his name and began playing rock and roll. His album with the Voidoids, Blank Generation (Sire, 1977), was one of the initial handful of “punk” progenitors...

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Table of Contents

Poetry: June 2025

POEMS

Editor’s Note, June 2025

Birdsong of Shaker Way

Flipping the Bird

Robben Island

Rise

Chicken for Breakfast

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“fruit fly”]

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“everyone’s/drawing the”]

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“each thread”]

From “First Light: 88 Frequencies” [“I feel/felt by”]

短歌四首

Four Tanka

On Translating Shizuka Omori

We Must Be in the Harvest Again

The Ostriches

The Star

Lake Chateau

An Optimism

Mouth

Do No Harm/I Dream of Goat

October 9

January 31

February 14

Pandemic Feature: The Breakfast Club

A Children’s Story

As Bee

The Story I Tell

Memorial Day

Remembering the Owo Massacre and many others of its kind

Ìbàdàn

The Death of the Book

Of Cicadas

And Then the Sky Pulls Up in a Silver VW Polo

Spiral, Surrounded by Spoiled Accord (Or, Schizoaffective, Unspecified)

Resignation

Temptation

サーカス

Circus

汚れつちまつた悲しみに ......

On This Bit of Soiled Sadness…

骨

Bone

曇天

Overcast Sky

On Translating Nakahara Chūya

Dear Sister Agnes,

For the Cult-Themed Party

Carolee Schneemann—Interior Scroll (1975)

Jenny Holzer—DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG (1978)

Bharti Kher—Confess (2010)

𐓐𐓎𐓍𐒰

Lillie in the Reign of Terror

Eloquence

En la sala de velación: Septiembre

Funeral home viewing room: September

Intenciones de respirar [“Ni un día más allá la maleza"]

Intentions to breathe [“Before even one day has passed"]

Intenciones de respirar [“fantasía"]

Intentions to breathe [“fantasia"]

On Translating bruno darío

All my life I was a bride married to amazement

HARD FEELINGS

On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe

On Neediness: Midnight Chimes

On Despair: It’s All a Charade