- POEMS

- LOVE’S AUSTERE AND LONELY OFFICES

- HARD FEELINGS

POEMS

- Editor’s Note, May 2026

- God of Song

- Bin by Bin

- From Below

- The World in Miniature

- Sir

- Cooking Gas Commercial

- Consular Still Life

- ithaca

- Ластовици

- Swallows

- Пиперки

- Peppers

- On Translating Blaže Koneski

- Walking Around My Apartment Topless, Boston Wild Turkey and I See Each Other

- Althea, it’s waning.

- How low did you have to go?

- The pale blue waters

- [discharge day #1]

- Egress [“What is it like,”]

- Egress [“With a wrecked heart, I looked at the dipping storm”]

- Oh I Thought You Knew, She Said, Dad Is Alive

- Everything Will Be Fucked Forever / A Time of Peace* Always Comes Again

- Cultural Achievements

- From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Las cabezas colosales olmecas”]

- From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“The colossal Olmec heads”]

- From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“En la luz ambarina”]

- From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“In the amber light”]

- From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Si los templos donaran”]

- From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“If the temples donated”]

- From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Las palabras del poema”]

- From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“The words of the poem”]

- उषा

- Dawn

- पथरीली घास-भरी इस पहाड़ी की ढाल पर

- On a Stony Grass-Covered Hillside

- एक आदमी दो पहाड़ों को कोहनियों

- A Man Pushes Two Hills

- दिन किशमिशी-रेशमी, गोरा

- The Day Raisiny

- On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

- “czy świat umrze trochę”

- “will the world die a little”

- “moje serce jest władcą absolutnym”

- “my heart is an autocrat”

- “Tego roku jest znowu wiosna”

- “It is spring again”

- On Translating Halina Poświatowska

- Saturday Class: Fever Dream (George, Breonna, and Trayvon)

- Saturday Class: Gwendolyn Brooks and “We Real Cool”

- Proof

ADRIAN MATEJKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Editor’s Note, May 2026

There’s no consistently iambic verse in the May issue, but there is—as always—form.

By Adrian Matejka

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Back in February, while many were still eating discounted heart-shaped chocolates, I attended the Symposium on Poetic Form at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. This biannual conference, created by poet and scholar David Caplan, was a chance to spend time with poetry scholars, readers, and practitioners, including recent Poetry contributors Katie Condon, Camille T. Dungy, Mag Gabbert, Ada Limón, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips, as well as former contributor and guest editor Srikanth Reddy. As its title suggests, the gathering focused on form’s sometimes stringent history and how it appears in contemporary poetry.

The conversations about stanzaic form and metrical verse took me back to my first attempt at writing in form as an undergraduate at Indiana University in 1991. The professor wrote a line of iambic pentameter on the chalkboard, and adorned it with accents and breves. He then said, “and that’s how iambic pentameter works,” and that was the entirety of his explanation. Most of the seminar nodded as if he’d handed them the key to prosody. I hadn’t overcome my nervousness about asking questions back then, so I nodded along with the rest of the crowd.

The assignment: write a sonnet in iambic pentameter. As was my way, I went straight to the library and read every example I could find (thank you, Norton Anthology of English Literature), but it might as well have been calculus. Not even Alexander Pope could help me hear an iamb. It was the drummer in a band I wrote (bad) lyrics for who finally demystified it: “It’s like making a beat on the lunchroom table,” he said. “Your knuckles are the snare. The bass happens when you switch to the meaty part.” He then drummed out iambic pentameter—boom, tap, boom, tap—on the table, and an entire metric world was revealed.

There’s no consistently iambic verse in the May issue, but there is—as always—form. Tracy K. Smith’s graceful tercets in “God of Song” gesture toward form’s storytelling possibilities. Carl Phillips turns to cinquains in “Sir” to consider “the fleet of questions,/the waves that clarify,/the ones that deepen.” Maria Zoccola’s “ithaca” returns to Odysseus in steady quatrains, while Saddiq Dzukogi approaches the epic through twin sectional poems titled “Egress.” Together, these works—like the conversations in Dallas—show that poetry’s traditions remain alive, enacted by contemporary poets who find their way to them, whether chalkboarded by a teacher or by a garage-rock drummer tapping a table like a tom.

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: Be Easy: New & Selected Poems (Liveright, 2023); Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke...

Read Full Biography

Next In Issue

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1786548/editors-note at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

TRACY K. SMITH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

God of Song

By Tracy K. Smith

Poem categories

Arts & Sciences

Music

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

My son listens into daylight,

head tilted, eyes tuned

past the range of  the seen.

What he seeks to see is

vibratory. A butterfly’s itch.

The pitch at which a mind

is freed to dart, spark, break

into flight. His gaze rakes space.

What does his ear see? Beads

of  breath rising from the body

of a bee. A whiff of rain batting

a new green leaf. I watch him—

tall as a man with cheeks

soft as plums—coax music

from pure air: trash bins

dragged across pavement.

An ant staggering under

the weight of a crumb. I’ve

watched him birth a tune,

held in that rite like a moth

in porchlight. Dispeller

of sorrow. Flame maker at

the holy pyre. All that repeats—

though it might tear out from

the breast and ravage the air

on its way to the timid heart in its

hollow lair—all that repeats

is sweet. Sand in honey. Gold

doused with blood. Birth pains

obeying love’s pulse and tug.

My water broke weeks early

to his body needing out. Knees

drawn, and that first long note—

All that repeats and repeats

to survive. Heart tone. Hunger

yawp. Fear handled by want

and love. All that repeats

and repeats. All that repeats—

let it be sweet?

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786552/god-of-song at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

TRACY K. SMITH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Bin by Bin

By Tracy K. Smith

Poem categories

Activities

Jobs & Working

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

The 5 AM truck idles

at the curb, inching along

to keep pace with the first man

walking, unlucky son whose job

is to rise when this city’s other men

have only just fallen into bed

drunk, sated, ghostlike from

scouring the parks, pubs,

bridges, piers, and stairs

to the nowhere men gather

after dusk. Saturday before

even the sun can blink an eye.

Venus still steady in the island’s

eastward sky. The keys to all

the city’s blue bins weigh down

his belt with a music soothing

to the worried sick and lonely.

Discrete Man. Dutiful One.

When he comes, he doesn’t

hum. Deep in duty, he lets

the music make itself: wine jugs,

beer bottles, mustard urns, dregs

in glass flasks, in crocks, in tins.

Phials of ointment meant not

to cure but to permit the sick

merely to endure. He greets

the cobbles like a lover,

tumbling empties down into

his barrel then up into his truck.

Like the night soil man—stoic hero

I saw sketched once in a schoolbook—

whose patient barrow combed

stone cities, thatched cities,

cities of brick and timber, wattle

and dung. Hauling our every

stark truth into the dark.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786554/bin-by-bin at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

CARL PHILLIPS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From Below

By Carl Phillips

Poem categories

The Mind

Perception

Relationships

Hope & Optimism

There’s a kind of shadow, easily missed, that

depth of field and depth of character

sometimes share

between them. Suffering, there, can seem

especially far away, though it’s

never far. It was one of those days when

just to have spoken at all

aloud feels like honesty or maybe more like

wanting to be honest, as if one had forgotten,

almost—not to want to,

but how. A lost art,

like predicting the future by

listening to the sounds leaves make, each

to the other, touching,

not touching ...

And yet so much,

still, to wish for. To have loved

differently, less deeply, more

reliably. I call that hope,

not regret. Bellflowers,

sand flowers; there at the field’s far edge.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786556/from-below at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

CARL PHILLIPS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The World in Miniature

By Carl Phillips

Poem categories

The Mind

Solitude

Time & Brevity

Loneliness

They woke beside one another. I touched

his face. Things that are over. Triumph, applause:

things that are weightless, invisible, both. Keeping

a secret versus telling a lie, things that matter

less, the more we think about them. Things like

how the word Arctic means bears nearby and Antarctic

means no bears—so they say. Things that aren’t lies

exactly, they just happen to be untrue. What Arctic

(from the ancient Greek) really means is near the bear,

meaning the bear-shaped constellation (Ursa Major,

which is Latin for Bear, the Larger) that almost

everyone I know only pretends to be able to find

in the night sky. Antarctic means not near the bear. As in

safe, maybe; or just a very specific loneliness; or both.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786558/the-world-in-miniature at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

CARL PHILLIPS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Sir

By Carl Phillips

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Relationships

You with your crown

of days for headdress,

your promises, for safe-

keeping. You hovering

as usual distantly nearby.

You and, beneath the

shifting force of you,

the fleet of questions,

the waves that clarify,

the ones that deepen.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786560/sir at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

MIGWI MWANGI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Cooking Gas Commercial

By Migwi Mwangi

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

The boy sprinting from Wa-Mso’s Shopping Center with a transparent plastic bag half-full of kerosene at sunset—past Big Spot Barber Shop, Think Twice Secondhand Clothes, through a rain of sparks from Samson’s Weldings, before disappearing between Johnnie Walker Keep Walking Pub and God’s Favorite Wines and Spirits—where is he flying to?

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786652/cooking-gas-commercial at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

MIGWI MWANGI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Consular Still Life

By Migwi Mwangi

Poem categories

Living

Mourning

Grief

The woman fetching a yellow slip from

the metal basin at American Embassy

counter six—come. Let us leave

the sorrow folding your face here.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786654/consular-still-life at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

MARIA ZOCCOLA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

ithaca

By Maria Zoccola

Poem categories

Activities

Sports & Outdoor Activities

Mythology & Folklore

Greek & Roman Mythology

twenty years older, muscles wasted on a diet of sun

and thin fish, does odysseus strain to pull that bow?

an audience of strangers. a woman who knows him

across the length of a shroud. ithaca bleak and fanged

all around him, foreign now. at the light-sick range

in the sticks, my archery teacher adjusts my form:

a softer grip, shoulder to elbow in one clean bridge.

i’m new to the sport, raw on the local desperation

to escape this place and return stronger or wilder or

more monstrous—but to return, you understand.

nostos. homegoing. tennessee. ithaca forever.

i’m seventeen. at full draw, a certain muscle

stretches wide in the upper back, always too tight

in beginners, crabbed and angry, unworked

by the world outside the range. it hunches cold

beneath the wedge of scapula, refusing to winch

my shoulder into true. corrective, my teacher seizes

the raised elbow, rams the arm into position.

pain crunches like a blown fuse, unwiring me:

the muscle tears. there were archers aboard

greek triremes, eyes above eyes prow-painted

to steer around disaster, watch over their own

wayfaring. long rangings in those days, weeks at sea.

for odysseus, years—an arrow suspended in flight,

far from its destination. some scholars say

odysseus strung a longbow so immense he alone

could bend its arms, though his was only mortal

strength, no divine parentage. others say the bow

was recurve, in greece a new and eastern

technology, strung backward, a puzzle too complex

for the enemies of  his house. when i heal enough

to lift my arms, i return to my compound bow,

intricate and sophisticated, rotating cams

on synchronized cables, a pull weight adjustable

to my youth. it’s simple to draw, no contest:

a single smooth arc, three fingers on the string.

the muscle in my back wails to announce itself,

an alarm that will sound for the rest of my days,

a reminder that home, unmarked, has marked me.

decades ago, when odysseus stepped into his ship,

the sea washed clean his footprints from the sand.

the lambs he raised are dead now; life ended

and began without his hand on the nock. once,

a king left his island and someone else came home.

quiet now, my teacher tells me. no rigidity in the limbs,

no anxiety in the bow. breathe in as you rise.

breathe out with release. odysseus opens his fingers

and watches his arrow streak through the heads

of a dozen axes, a shuttle clacking across the warp

of a loom. my aim, never perfect, spatters the target,

but i know my form: bend until the muscle sings.

it’s strong enough to launch, fly. arrive again.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786564/ithaca at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

BLAŽE KONESKI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ластовици

By Blaže Koneski

Poem categories

Nature

Animals

Language

Macedonian

В зори пискаат ластовиците

птици врз кои ноќта и денот се делат,

ние сме брзи совалки—пискаат—

што ткаеме нејасна преѓа на тајната

самракот ни е нашата стихија

и сè што е миговен допир на граница.

Водата со воздухот како ги порабуваме

сте нè гледале,

но нема в небо никаква трага од нашата работа.

Така пискаат ластовиците.

Notes:

From The Complete Works of Blaže Koneski: A Critical Edition, edited by Milan Gjurčinov (Skopje: Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2011). This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786568/lastovici at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

BLAŽE KONESKI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Swallows

By Blaže Koneski

Translated By Kristian Josifoski

Translated from the Macedonian

The swallows screech at dawn

Birds which day from night divide

We are quick shuttles

Weaving the blurred thread of mystery

Dusk is our element

Brushing the edge of a moment

You’ve seen us

Hemming air to water

But the heavens keep not a trace of our work—

So cry the swallows.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Blaže Koneski.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Blaže Koneski

By Kristian Josifoski

May 1, 2026

Koneski’s contributions as a scholar, linguist, academic, poet, fiction writer, and translator were foundational in the development of Modern Macedonian literature.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786570/swallows at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

BLAŽE KONESKI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Пиперки

By Blaže Koneski

Poem categories

Activities

Eating & Drinking

Gratitude

Joy & Contentment

Language

Macedonian

Прилепското со пиперки се слави,

со купишта на пазарот ги има,

ги јадеме во салати, во тави,

во туршија ги чуваме за зима.

Ги има живи и лути и благи,

и човек во нив го наоѓа лекот,

со сол и пипер сме крепеле снаги,

со пинџур ни е нам поубав векот.

Ќе дојде есен со своите чари,

во низи пипер секој дом го скрила,

чардаците ги красат рујни шари

и куќата е невестица мила.

И така кај нас од времиња стари

се создава убавина и сила.

Notes:

From The Complete Works of Blaže Koneski: A Critical Edition, edited by Milan Gjurčinov (Skopje: Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2011). This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786572/piperki at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

BLAŽE KONESKI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Peppers

By Blaže Koneski

Translated By Kristian Josifoski

Translated from the Macedonian

In Prilep we celebrate with peppers.

We heap them in bushels in the bazaar.

We eat them with salads, straight from the pan,

pickle them with veggies for the winter.

Raw, hot, or sweet,

in them you’ll find elixir.

With some salt and pepper, we grow strong.

With some relish, our lives are beautiful.

Autumn will come with its charms,

with peppers that every home will keep.

Balconies will be adorned with colorful reds,

each house like a cute young bride.

In our towns of old, this is how we

make our beauty, our pride.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Blaže Koneski.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Blaže Koneski

By Kristian Josifoski

May 1, 2026

Koneski’s contributions as a scholar, linguist, academic, poet, fiction writer, and translator were foundational in the development of Modern Macedonian literature.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786574/peppers at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

KRISTIAN JOSIFOSKI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Blaže Koneski

Koneski’s contributions as a scholar, linguist, academic, poet, fiction writer, and translator were foundational in the development of Modern Macedonian literature.

By Kristian Josifoski

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Blaže Koneski (1921–1993) was born in the small village of Nebregovo, Macedonia. His contributions as a scholar, linguist, academic, poet, fiction writer, and translator were foundational in the development of Modern Macedonian literature. Koneski was involved in standardizing the literary language of Macedonia, and published the first textbooks on Modern Macedonian grammar in the fifties, as well as the influential The History of the Macedonian Language in 1965.

Koneski’s poetics marked a shift from traditional folksong forms, but retained folklore motifs. Indeed, it’s what draws me most to this poetry. We see this in “Peppers,” a joyful, poignant, and pastoral lyric. The pepper is more than a local crop. It’s a symbol of tradition. The pepper is sowed in lives, in customs. The original Macedonian poem is straightforward and conversational, but very musical. “Peppers” does not have a structured meter, but because accents in Macedonian words are placed on the third from last syllable, a natural interplay between dactyl and trochee meters are very common, even in conversation. My English version retains some of these rhythms: “We heap them in bushels in the bazar./We eat them with salads, straight from the pan,” and, “Autumn will come with its charms.” Although I never seek to fully replicate the original meters of Macedonian verse, my English versions often feature complex rhythms to mimic the sound of Macedonian.

My translation of “Swallows” was inspired by Anne Pennington’s translation. Koneski’s poem is originally one block of free verse composed of ten lines, but Pennington separates the poem into four stanzas with a total of twelve lines. Koneski’s poem features dialogue from the swallows, which I mark through italics. Like Pennington, I break the poem into separate stanzas to emphasize the words of the swallows.

A notable feature of the Pennington translations is erasure. Her English versions are stripped down: they do not mirror the rhythmic complexity of Macedonian, nor does she faithfully replicate Koneski’s images; she even omits some of Koneski’s lines. The result is a modern lyrical style that breaks down grammar and syntax—an E.E. Cummings rendition of Koneski. But Koneski is more in the tradition of Yeats or Lorca. I break from Pennington’s approach in that my version of “Swallows” is composed of complete sentences, since Koneski’s original is not fragmented.

Kristian Josifoski is a composer and poet. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The Lighter, Cagibi, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.

Read Full Biography

Previous In Issue Next In Issue

Poem

From the magazine:Ластовици

By Blaže Koneski

В зори пискаат ластовиците

птици врз кои ноќта и денот се делат,

ние сме брзи совалки—пискаат—

што ткае…

Poem

From the magazine:Swallows

By Blaže Koneski

Translated By Kristian Josifoski

The swallows screech at dawn

Birds which day from night divide

We are quick shuttles

Weaving the blurred…

Poem

From the magazine:Пиперки

By Blaže Koneski

Прилепското со пиперки се слави,

со купишта на пазарот ги има,

ги јадеме во салати, во тави,

во туршија…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1788111/on-translating-blaze-koneski at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

JENI PRATER | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Walking Around My Apartment Topless, Boston Wild Turkey and I See Each Other

By Jeni Prater

Poem categories

The Body

Joy & Contentment

& we hold our bodies tight like a gaze.

Is it gall or instinct that I know

my stone’s-throw titties could be a Zoom background

& still stare back, prey-eyed & breasted?

It is terror the turkey’s hunch knows

to preserve its animal layers, and still

it stares back, too brazen to be prey-eyed.

I want to fear my body—

to touch my animal layers.

I wear my nipples like jewelry. I want

to delight in my body, like lush

deer who won’t scamper. On FaceTime with my love,

I wear my nipples like jewelry—breasts outlined like eyes

in rope—I relish the warm jitter of release,

like these birds who won’t scamper from their own bodies.

I hold mine tight like a gaze.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786660/walking-around-my-apartment-topless-boston-wild-turkey-and-i-see-each-other at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

DIANE SEUSS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Althea, it’s waning.

By Diane Seuss

Poem categories

Nature

Weather

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Melancholy & Despair

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

It’s raining

into the pale pail you sip

from.

It’s winnowing

beneath the billowing

clouds.

Specify the “it.”

What winnows

and wanes?

Althea flips her mop

of  hair. Her talent is looking

off  where

I am not. Something

wanes down the drain.

Something

whinnies as it billows,

a horse with a mop

for a mane.

The only solid is

the rain gauge

of  the page.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786656/althea-its-waning at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

DIANE SEUSS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How low did you have to go?

By Diane Seuss

Poem categories

Religion

Faith & Doubt

The Body

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

To the hell

level where they kept

the clown

costumes?

Or puppet room

Bible school

where the bad

girl had

to crouch on a step

stool

during the choral

reading of the archive

of  begats

in Genesis 5?

Or lower,

to the steamy hive

of pipes and charts

in the machine

room below

metaphysics and art?

Althea found it

years ago, in a snowy

meadow, deep

in the sticks. She held

a dowsing rod

shaped from a wire

hanger which swung

in the general

direction of god.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786664/how-low-did-you-have-to-go at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

DIANE SEUSS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The pale blue waters

By Diane Seuss

Poem categories

Living

Death & Dying

Parenthood

The Body

Melancholy & Despair

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

of the toilet bowl. The roiling

red ringlet

of  blood back when I bled.

That’s what I said:

when I bled

into the still

blue waters.

If  I still

had daughters they’d take

over bleeding from me.

But here at the end

of the world,

my daughters

are dead. There’s only one

girl, and

she’s all in my head.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786662/the-pale-blue-waters at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SARA E. HUGHES | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

[discharge day #1]

By sara e. hughes

Poem categories

Living

The Body

Health & Illness

The Mind

i imagine myself

in a room of chairs

i walk myself to the desk

tell them there is nothing to be wrong

tell them

i am a chair

in a room full of chairs

there is

a pit of children’s toys

a man coughing florets

in group we make hats out of tinfoil for our families

glue eyes to dinner plates

a new patient arrives

asks what town we’re in

what state we’re in

he has dinner plate eyes

he puts his cupped hand to his ear

whispers

in every instance

hope for rain

Notes:

Download a PDF of the poem to see its intended format (PDF, 37 KB)

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786578/discharge-day-1 at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SADDIQ DZUKOGI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Egress [“What is it like,”]

By Saddiq Dzukogi

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Melancholy & Despair

What is it like,

to be shackled to the chains of freedom,

to the glee of greener pasture? What is it like

to be carouseled in the circular dreams of fools,

a play ride

with suspended hopes that really takes you nowhere.

And a few weeks ago, in my daughter’s old stroller,

I tended to the wren’s eggs

and watched the hatched birdies

call out feathers to their wings.

And you wonder why I refuse to learn an old anthem

where there is nothing old or new to grasp.

Well, where the young are haunted by the nostalgias of the old,

who entrusts the future to the hands of destruction?

Who?

I promise you, I am not angry, I am just tired of  believing

in a future led by fools.

And if you hear fool one more time, bear with me.

I come from a nest of oafs.

I come from a nest, of oafs.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786582/egress-what-is-it-like at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SADDIQ DZUKOGI | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Egress [“With a wrecked heart, I looked at the dipping storm”]

By Saddiq Dzukogi

Poem categories

Living

Death & Dying

Mourning

Grief

With a wrecked heart, I looked at the dipping storm

and asked, away from your mother, where are you going now?

And I swear I could hear him, storm,

say, if  I die, nobody will know

until my body starts to furrow,

until the wind picks up the scent

of my dying. There is a stock of crabgrass

in the corner,

lightning in the distance, in the swirling sand

and street dirt, there is a man on the

side

of the road shoveling compost

out of his truck, onto the earth of his lawn.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786580/egress-with-a-wrecked-heart-i-looked-at-the-dipping-storm at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

EUGENIA LEIGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Oh I Thought You Knew, She Said, Dad Is Alive

By Eugenia Leigh

Poem categories

Living

Death & Dying

The Body

Health & Illness

Time & Brevity

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Types/Modes

Visual Poetry

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

Notes:

Source: Penrose Diagram by Fred the Oyster, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Download a PDF of this poem.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786586/oh-i-thought-you-knew-she-said-dad-is-alive at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

EUGENIA LEIGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Everything Will Be Fucked Forever / A Time of Peace* Always Comes Again

By Eugenia Leigh

Poem categories

Living

Death & Dying

The Body

Health & Illness

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Visual Poetry

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

Notes:

Source: Bifurcation Diagram by PAR, public domain

Download a PDF of this poem.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786584/everything-will-be-fucked-forever-a-time-of-peace-always-comes-again at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

MARK BIBBINS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Cultural Achievements

By Mark Bibbins

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Relationships

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

I’ve only written one

decent joke in my life

so far. I say “written,”

although this is the first

time I’m actually

writing it down—

and “this” isn’t

writing, it’s typing,

which was how

Truman Capote described

Jack Kerouac’s whole

output. I used to live

two doors west

of where the latter

typed On the Road,

which I read decades ago

and now remember

nothing about—maybe

that wasn’t reading

but looking.

When the star

of a play dies,

someone has to bury

the lead. That wasn’t

the joke, it’s more

of a quip.

Don’t be political,

don’t be sentimental,

don’t even try

to be funny;

take up pickling,

knitting, or philately

instead; do anything

useful for a change.

What do you call

a dozen eggs

if you’re anti-choice?

A jury of your peers.

I can never find

the brownstone in

the Village where

Marianne Moore used

to live, even though

there’s a plaque,

and it’s been years

since I wandered

into Patchin Place

after midnight

to look up at

E.E. Cummings’s

apartment, trying

to impress another

person I can’t remember.

Yes, I’m aware

of the awful

things about him

and many of his

poems, but I still

enjoy a cul-de-sac

and catching incandescent

light on my tongue

when it spills

through the windows

of the dead.

____

Alice B. Toklas said

you don’t really know

a book until you’ve typed

and proofread it,

and that you’ll never

know a painting unless

you dust it every day.

Sometimes I am practical

but mostly I’m absurd—

I suspect Alice would

have praised both qualities

while secretly preferring

the former, but I have

no idea. I miss resting

my hands on the shoulders

of my friends. Once

I stood outside the gates

of the building where Alice

lived with Gertrude Stein

and it felt like a cultural

achievement, as if,

had I found the nerve

to ring the bell, history

might have buzzed

me in. Later that evening

a friend told me

he’d also tracked down—

although his wasn’t

a gay pilgrimage per se—

27 Rue de Fleurus

but that he’d actually

summoned the guts

to walk through

the courtyard

and into the building

as one of the tenants

was leaving for the day.

I cursed my lack

of nerve, but the risk

of having friends

with better stories than

yours is that you end

up liking the stories

better than the friends.

I wonder whether

Alice preferred stories

to friends. The next

time I visit I should

sneak inside and ask.

Maybe I’ll offer

to help her with

the dusting—we could

start with the paintings

closest to the ceiling

and work our way down.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786588/cultural-achievements at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Las cabezas colosales olmecas”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

History & Politics

Arts & Sciences

Painting & Sculpture

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Language

Spanish

Las cabezas colosales olmecas fueron talladas en basalto. Hay una que siempre ves cuando piensas en las cabezas colosales olmecas. Hay diecisiete cabezas
colosales olmecas, pero sólo esa cabeza colosal olmeca viene a tu mente cuando piensas en cabezas colosales olmecas, la que está junto al sendero bajo una ceiba, un flamboyán y un hule en el parque-museo de La Venta en Villahermosa, Tabasco. Es un intento por recrear el entorno donde la encontraron. Lo que no se pudieron llevar fue la hendidura en el suelo de la selva. Mientras tu atención estaba en los rasgos de la cabeza colosal olmeca, la que ves cuando piensas en cabezas colosales olmecas, escuchaste a tus papás discutir la nomenclatura exacta de una estela cercana: senos, decía mamá; chichis, decía papá.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786596/from-pequenas-cordilleras-de-sargazo-las-cabezas-colosales-olmecas at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“The colossal Olmec heads”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

History & Politics

Arts & Sciences

Painting & Sculpture

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Translated from the Spanish by the author

The colossal Olmec heads were carved in basalt. There is one that you always see when you think about colossal Olmec heads. There are seventeen colossal Olmec heads, but only this single colossal Olmec head comes to mind when you think about colossal Olmec heads. The one next to the path under a ceiba, a poinciana, and a rubber tree in the museum-park of La Venta, in Villahermosa, Tabasco. It’s an attempt to re-create the environment where it was found. What they couldn’t take was the hollow left in the rainforest floor. While you were observing the features on the colossal Olmec head, the one you see when you think about colossal Olmec heads, you heard your parents arguing the precise nomenclature of a stela nearby: Breasts, said mom; tits, said dad.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786592/from-small-sargasso-mountains-the-colossal-olmec-heads at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“En la luz ambarina”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Activities

Travels & Journeys

Arts & Sciences

Painting & Sculpture

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Language

Spanish

En la luz ambarina los ojos del perro ruegan la caricia de la mano regordeta de Francisco. Estoy casi seguro de que sus manos eran así. En la pared a mi izquierda hay un retrato a lápiz de mi madre joven. Lo miro por las mañanas cuando el sesgo del sol roza su marco: “para Marcia, París ’52,” junto una firma ilegible. Una mañana de invierno Siobhan y yo vimos El aquelarre de Goya en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Boston y le conté de mi sueño de guirnaldas enredadas en los cuernos de un toro. En uno de los murales de Palacio Nacional, que de niño visitaba a menudo con mi papá, hay un hombre indígena atado de rodillas a quien le acercan a su cachete un fierro para marcar al rojo vivo. Cada vez que lo veía, pensaba “moreno como el mío.” Mi papá, mi hermano y yo tomábamos la línea dos de la estación General Anaya hasta Bellas Artes. Caminábamos por Avenida Madero para pasar por la American Bookstore, donde trabajaba un amigo de papá. Después, a Templo Mayor. Una vez nos contó la leyenda de un tío nuestro que se había perdido en las librerías de viejo de Donceles, para jamás volver a ser visto. En la tarde comíamos en el Casino Español, adonde el murmullo de Isabel La Católica entraba por los ventanales. Yo siempre pedía caracoles a la montañesa. Una tarde casi al anochecer, nos dijo que la palabra correcta era tránsito y no tráfico mientras esperábamos a que pasara un caleidoscopio de mariposas para poder cruzar la calle.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1788437/from-pequenas-cordilleras-de-sargazo-en-la-luz-ambarina at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“In the amber light”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Activities

Travels & Journeys

Arts & Sciences

Painting & Sculpture

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Translated from the Spanish by the author

In the amber light, the dog’s eyes beg for the touch of Francisco’s chubby hand. I’m almost certain his hands were like that. On the wall to my left, there’s a portrait in pencil of my mom as a young woman. I look at it in the mornings, when the slanted sunlight touches its frame. “For Marcia, Paris ’52,” next to an illegible signature. One winter morning, Siobhan and I saw Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath at the MFA in Boston. I told her about my dream of garlands entangled around a bull’s horns. In one of the murals in the National Palace in Mexico City, which I often visited with my dad as a child, there is a young Indigenous man on his knees, tied up with a red-hot branding iron held close to his cheek. Whenever I saw it I thought, “Brown like mine.” My dad, brother, and I used to take the metro line two from the General Anaya station to the Bellas Artes station. We would walk down Madero Avenue and stop at the American Bookstore where a friend of Dad’s worked. Then, on to Templo Mayor. One time, Dad told us a legend about an uncle of ours who got lost around the secondhand bookstores of Donceles Street, never to be seen again. In the afternoon, we would eat at the Spanish Casino, where the buzz from Isabel La Católica Avenue would come up through the French windows. I always used to ask for Basque-style snails. One evening almost at dusk he told us that the correct word was not traffic but transit while we were waiting for a kaleidoscope of butterflies to pass so we could cross the street.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1788457/from-small-sargasso-mountains-in-the-amber-light at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Si los templos donaran”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

Religion

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Language

Spanish

Si los templos donaran sus columnas los pájaros tendrían de donde hilar los matices de sus cantos. El tornamesa y los discos de la infancia. Mamá siempre ponía el mismo para despertarnos entre semana. Antes, había sido el silbato de la fábrica de papel, pero se quedó cerrada después de una huelga. Las campanas todavía llaman a misa. El arco olvidado en un llano. La flecha caída antes del blanco de centro rojo como la herida en tu cabeza. La neblina no dejaba ver lo que venía después de la curva, pero podía distinguir las puntas de los pinos. Mis ojos les colgaban cuerdas en caso de que cayéramos por el precipicio. Pencas de henequén crecían en las cubiertas de los barcos. Cuando se partió el pan de centeno, un apacible calor se extendió a los otros granos. Frente a la cripta de nuestro abuelo en el Panteón Español, Lorenzo tocaba su violín, un Día de muertos, cuando le llevamos conchas, una lata de root beer y un libro de poemas.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1788438/from-pequenas-cordilleras-de-sargazo-si-los-templos-donaran at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“If the temples donated”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

Religion

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Translated from the Spanish by the author

If the temples donated their columns, birds would have a place to string the hues of their songs. A record player and childhood albums. Every day of the week, Mom played the same one to wake us up. It used to be the whistle from the paper mill, but it closed after a strike. The bells still call to mass. A bow was left forgotten on a field. The arrow fallen before the target with a red center, like the wound in your head. The haze didn’t let us see what was coming around the curve, but I could make out the tops of the evergreens. My eyes twisted ropes together in case we fell off the cliff. Stalks of henequen growing on the decks of ships. When the loaf of rye was broken, a peaceful heat spread out to the other grains. Lorenzo played the violin in front of our grandfather’s crypt in the Spanish Cemetery. It was the Day of the Dead. We brought him conchas, a can of root beer, and a book of poems.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1788459/from-small-sargasso-mountains-if-the-temples-donated at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Las palabras del poema”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Arts & Sciences

Reading & Books

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Language

Spanish

Las palabras del poema dan forma a lo que viene apareciendo. Su emerger es posible por la voz que infla las palabras. No quiere decir que no existiera antes, tal vez, en un viento, apreciado sólo por la intuición. Para mí, la forma sigue saliendo en las palabras del español de la Ciudad de México. Por las noches, cuando mi hermano y yo éramos niños, mi mamá nos leía La Ilíada sentada al borde de una de nuestras camas. Era un librito de pastas rojas. La voz de mi madre en la noche dando forma a la distancia.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1788439/from-pequenas-cordilleras-de-sargazo-las-palabras-del-poema at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ANTONIO OCHOA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“The words of the poem”]

By Antonio Ochoa

Poem categories

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Arts & Sciences

Reading & Books

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Translated from the Spanish by the author

The words of the poem give shape to what is appearing. Surfacing is possible due to the voice that blows up the words. This does not deny its previous existence in a wind, perhaps, appreciated only by intuition. For me, the shape continues to appear in words of Mexico City Spanish. At night, when my brother and I were kids, our mom used to sit on the edge of one of our beds to read us The Iliad. It was a small book with red binding. My mother’s voice in the night giving shape to distance.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1788460/from-small-sargasso-mountains-the-words-of-the-poem at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

उषा

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Stars, Moons, & Space

Language

Hindi

प्रात नभ था बहुत नीला शंख जैसे

भोर का नभ

राख से लीपा हुआ चौका

(अभी गीला पड़ा है)

बहुत काली सिल ज़रा-से लाल केसर से

कि जैसे धुल गई हो

स्लेट पर या लाल खड़िया चाक

मल दी हो किसी ने

नील जल में या किसी की

गौर झिलमिल देह

जैसे हिल रही हो।

और...

जादू टूटता है इस उषा का अब

सूर्योदय हो रहा है।

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786600/ushhaaa at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Dawn

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Translated By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Translated from the Hindi

The sky like a blue conch shell

The sky of daybreak

A kitchen—still not dry—

cleansed with wood-ash

A saddle quern

pitch black with a touch of red saffron

as if washed with it

or as if someone had rubbed

red clay chalk on a writing slate

or as if in blue water floated

a fair

shimmering body

And ...

when the magic ends,

the sun rises.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

May 1, 2026

The only world he cared for was poetry.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786602/dawn at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

पथरीली घास-भरी इस पहाड़ी की ढाल पर

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Types/Modes

Pastoral

Language

Hindi

1942

पथरीली घास-भरी इस पहाड़ी के ढाल पर, टॉप्सी और मैं।

बगल में सचेत बैठी स्पैनियल की तेज-तेज साँस।

एक अनमना-सा आधा स्केच;

धूप में चमकती, मेरी गोद में एक सफ़ेद कॉपी खुली।

हिलते-चमकते बहुत-हरे छोटे-बड़े पेड़ मेरे चारों ओर खड़े।

धूप से उज्ज्वल-नीले आकाश में, धुले आकाश में उज्ज्वल,

वर्षा के बादल।

मानो रुई की बिखरी बिखरी छोटी-बड़ी पूनियाँ।

कभी-कभी धीमी धीमी साफ़ मधुर हवा की गूंज-

ढाक के वन के ढाल के हलके, धीमे चड़मड़ चड़मड़-मर्मर के पीछे का

बैकग्राउंड एक स्टेशन।

इंजन की ज्झाँयें-ज्झाँयँ ! ग्घर्रर ! ग्घर्रर लम्बी स्स्सीई

- नहीं तो यहाँ केवल हवा के मधुर हलके स्वर ही थे।

कोमल-मोटी-एक-दो बार पतली-सीटी। शंटिंग

इंजन—

हवाओं की मिली-जुली कानाफूसियाँ। सजग टॉप्सी।

नीचे वह दूर एक बड़ा, धूमिल हरा झिलमिल उद्यान-सा,

और अनगिनती छतों से कहीं-कहीं चमकता हुआ,

शहर जबलपुर।

उसके हरियाले लांज, बीच-बीच में हरियाले कंपाउंड्स।

और नीचे हमारे पास ही खुदाई के लाल-काले कँकरीले ढेर।

...एक शोर-सा-वह कौन चिड़िया बोली ?

फिर ? फिर ?

पास का वह काँच घर। कहीं बच्चों का भी कुछ द्वंद्व-सा।

सर पर लाल मिट्टी के बोझ उठाये हुए मजूरनियों की टोलियाँ।

किसी स्टीम देते हुए इंजन की एक धीरे-धीरे पास आती

साँस-

तेज; फिर एकाएक बन्द : मगर नहीं -

अचानक एक लम्बी सीटी।

धूप का तेज़ तिरछा ढाल।

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786606/patharaiilii-ghaaasa-bharaii-isa-pahaaaugdhaii-kaii-dhaaal-para at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

On a Stony Grass-Covered Hillside

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Translated By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Translated from the Hindi

1942

On a stony grass-covered hillside, sitting next to me, is Topsy.

She is panting and has the spaniel’s alertness.

In my lap is an open sketchbook, in it a drawing

made half-heartedly.

The white page dazzles in the sun.

Around me, intensely green, are trees, a few of them young.

In the blue rain-washed sky, like scattered balls of uncarded cotton,

radiant monsoon clouds.

Sometimes, the soft echoes of the wind, clean, sweet—

and the creaking murmur of dhak trees. Behind them

—a railway station.

The hiss of the locomotive. Ghaghad! Ghaghad! Then a long, steamy exhalation

—there was only the faint sighing of the wind otherwise.

Soft, loud, once or twice shrill—a whistle. It comes from

the shunting yard.

Topsy is on high alert. There are conspiracies afoot in the wind.

Below, in the distance, what looks to be a garden,

a large indistinct patch of green

and countless rooftops, some

gleaming in the sun—the city of Jabalpur,

its green lawns, here and there the green compounds of houses.

And near us a digging—red and black stones heaped up

... a screech—what bird was it?

Again? Again?

Close by, a glass house. Somewhere are children playing or squabbling.

Files of women laborers, each woman carrying a headload of red murrum.

The slow breathing of a locomotive as it approaches—

the breathing gets rapid, shallow. Then comes to a sudden stop. But no—

and without any warning—a long whistle.

On the incline, the slant of the hot sun.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

May 1, 2026

The only world he cared for was poetry.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786604/on-a-stony-grass-covered-hillside at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

एक आदमी दो पहाड़ों को कोहनियों

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Language

Hindi

1956

एक आदमी दो पहाड़ों को कोहनियों से ठेलता

पूरब से पच्छिम को एक कदम से नापता

बढ़ रहा है

कितनी ऊंची घासें चांद-तारों को छूने-छूने को हैं

जिनसे घुटनों को निकालता वह बढ़ रहा है

अपनी शाम को सुबह से मिलाता हुआ

फिर क्यों

दो बादलों के तार

उसे महज उलझा रहे हैं?

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786608/eka-aathamaii-thao-pahaaaugdhaon-kao-kaohanaiyaon at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Man Pushes Two Hills

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Translated By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Translated from the Hindi

1956

A man pushes two hills with his elbows.

Measuring the distance from east to west in one step,

he moves forward.

The tall grass is so tall it almost touches the sky.

Through it he advances on his knees,

joining his evening to his morning.

Why, then,

are the wires of two clouds

entangling him?

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

May 1, 2026

The only world he cared for was poetry.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786666/a-man-pushes-two-hills at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

दिन किशमिशी-रेशमी, गोरा

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Sleep & Dreams

Time & Brevity

Melancholy & Despair

Language

Hindi

दिन

किशमिशी रेशमी गोरा

मुसकराता

आब

मोतियों की छिपाए अपनी

पाँखड़ियों तले

सुर्मयी गहराइयाँ

भाव में स्थिर

जागते हों स्वप्न जैसे

माँगते हों कुछ...

खिलौना जागता-सा

मौन कोई

क्या वही तो तू नहीं है मन?

____

गोद यह

रेशमीगोरी, अस्थिर

अस्थिर

हो उठती

आज

किसके लिए?

____

जा

ओ बहार

जा!

मैं जा चुका कब का

तू भी...

ये सपने न दिखा!

जाविदानी है अगर्चे तू

जाविदानी है अगर्चे जिन्दगी

फिर भी

रह म कर!

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786668/thaina-kaishamaishaii-raeshamaii-gaoraaa at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

SHAMSHER BAHADUR SINGH | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Day Raisiny

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Translated By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Translated from the Hindi

The day

raisiny   silky   fair

smiling

The luster of pearls hidden

under its petals

Depths the color of surma

the emotions calm

When you wake it’s like a dream waking

asking for someone ...

The silence of a toy

half awake

Isn’t this what you are, dear heart?

____

And this lap

silky   fair      restless

For whom is it

restless

today?

____

Go

springtime

go.

I turned my back long ago.

Don’t show me

any more dreams.

Though you are eternal

though life is eternal

even so

have mercy.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

May 1, 2026

The only world he cared for was poetry.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786610/the-day-raisiny at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

The only world he cared for was poetry.

By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Shamsher Bahadur Singh (1911–1993) published his first book, Kuch Kavitaein (“Some Poems”), in 1959, and his second, Kuch Aur Kavitaein (“Some More Poems”), in 1961. Both “Dawn” and “The Day Raisiny” are from the first. “A Man Pushes Two Hills,” though written in 1956, is from the second. “On This Stony Grass-covered Hillside,” written in 1942, did not appear until 1975, when Singh’s third book, Chuka Bhi Hoon Mein Nahin! (“I’ve Not Finished With Loving Yet”), was published.

The reason for these time lapses is Singh’s own reluctance to publish books. Even once he overcame his reluctance, Singh left the task of selection to his friend Jagat Shankdhar, who chose the poems that appear in Singh’s first and third books. Singh expressed “extreme dissatisfaction” with his own work, insisting on the necessity of Shankdhar’s critical eye. “The fact of the matter is,” he says (as I’ve translated it for those reading this note),

that when I look at my poems from a societal perspective, they do not seem to be of much worth. However faint it may be, I’ve always had a question mark hanging over them. But let’s not talk about this now. It’s my personal opinion.

Apart from his own diffidence, there is another reason why Singh, despite publishing widely in Hindi journals from the thirties onwards, avoided book publication. “In all honesty,” he writes in the introduction to Some More Poems (as I've translated it for readers), the selection for which he made himself,

the “publication” of art is something to which I attach little importance. Art has nothing to do with the calendar. It is something deeply personal, and to the extent that it is deeply personal, it will, with time, if it rings true from the artistic and emotional perspective, ring true for others. It’ll publish itself. And for the poet it is never not published, provided the art is authentic and solidly built.

As a person, Singh has been described as unworldly. Perhaps a more accurate description of him would be to say that the only world he cared for was poetry, and in this he was worldly-wise.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s new collection of poems is Of Least Concern (Shearsman Books, 2025). He lives in Dehradun, India.

Read Full Biography

Previous In Issue Next In Issue

Poem

From the magazine:उषा

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

प्रात नभ था बहुत नीला शंख जैसे

भोर का नभ

राख से लीपा हुआ चौका

(अभी गीला पड़ा है)

बहुत काली सिल ज़रा-से ल…

Poem

From the magazine:Dawn

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

Translated By Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

The sky like a blue conch shell

The sky of daybreak

A kitchen—still not dry—

cleansed with wood-ash

A saddle…

Poem

From the magazine:पथरीली घास-भरी इस पहाड़ी की ढाल पर

By Shamsher Bahadur Singh

1942

पथरीली घास-भरी इस पहाड़ी के ढाल पर, टॉप्सी और मैं।

बगल में सचेत बैठी स्पैनियल की तेज-तेज साँस।

एक…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1788137/on-translating-shamsher-bahadur-singh at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“czy świat umrze trochę”

By Halina Poświatowska

Poem categories

Living

Death & Dying

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Language

Polish

czy świat umrze trochę

kiedy ja umrę

patrzę patrzę

ubrany w lisi kołnierz

idzie świat

nigdy nie myślałam

że jestem włosem w jego futrze

zawsze byłam tu

on — tam

a jednak

miło jest pomyśleć

że świat umrze trochę

kiedy ja umrę

Notes:

Halina Poświatowska, “czy świat umrze trochę,” © copyright by Teresa M. Porębska and Zbigniew Myga, © copyright by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786614/czy-swiat-umrze-troche at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“will the world die a little”

By Halina Poświatowska

Translated By Ryan Mihaly & Karolina Zapal

Translated from the Polish

will the world die a little

when I die

I watch him going going

dressed in a fox collar

I could never be

a thread in that scarf

I was always here

he wasn’t

and yet

it’s nice to think

the world will die a little

when I die

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Halina Poświatowska

By Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

May 1, 2026

There’s playfulness and a love of life set against the specter of death.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786616/will-the-world-die-a-little at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“moje serce jest władcą absolutnym”

By Halina Poświatowska

Poem categories

Love

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Language

Polish

moje serce jest władcą absolutnym

ach jak ono się panoszy

przesłania mi cały świat

zagłusza plusk fontanny

szybsze od skrzydeł gołębia

przysiada na parapecie

potem długo patrzy w dół

z ósmego piętra

i cieszy się widząc małość ludzi

i własną wielkość

Notes:

Halina Poświatowska, “moje serce jest władcą absolutnym,” © copyright by Teresa M. Porębska and Zbigniew Myga, © copyright by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786670/moje-serce-jest-wladca-absolutnym at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“my heart is an autocrat”

By Halina Poświatowska

Translated By Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

Translated from the Polish

my heart is an autocrat

ach! how it runs rampant

obscuring the world

it silences the fountains

and flies up to the eighth floor

quicker than a pigeon

then from the parapet

it gazes for hours

delighting in tiny people

basking in its greatness

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Halina Poświatowska

By Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

May 1, 2026

There’s playfulness and a love of life set against the specter of death.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786618/my-heart-is-an-autocrat at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“Tego roku jest znowu wiosna”

By Halina Poświatowska

Poem categories

Love

Desire & Erotic Love

Nature

Plants & Fungi

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Language

Polish

Tego roku jest znowu wiosna, wiosna niesłychanie znajoma, dlaczego więc poezja dławi się własnym oddechem. Drzewo pod moim oknem popełnia plagiat już dwudziesty rok z rzędu do liści zielonych dodając zielone liście. Kwiaty czereśni tego roku nie są inne niż na początku drzewa czereśniowego, ten sam zapach co wczoraj przenika powietrze. I—chociaż ludzie starzy twierdzą, że to nużące—moja siostra całuje się pod drzewami tak samo, jak ja się całowałam; całuje się namiętnie popełniając w nieskończoność plagiat z pierwszego pocałunku. Jeszcze mogłabym przywołać trawy, wszystkie trawy, które wzeszły z nasion wiernie i nieustępliwie, te same, takie same jak kilka miesięcy temu. Życie nie obawia się popełniać plagiatu rodząc życie i zawsze jednakowo zdumiewa monotonna w swym uporze śmierć. Dlaczego więc potępiać wiersze o miłości, czemu mieć im za złe bezwstyd
i prymityw bezładnego jęku rozkoszy powtarzanego wiernie przez niedbałe o poczytność stulecia.

Notes:

Halina Poświatowska, “Tego roku jest znowu wiosna,” © copyright by Teresa M. Porębska and Zbigniew Myga, © copyright by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786620/tego-roku-jest-znowu-wiosna at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“It is spring again”

By Halina Poświatowska

Translated By Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

Translated from the Polish

It is spring again, spring so astonishingly familiar: so why is poetry choking on itself? The tree outside my window is committing plagiarism for the twentieth year in a row, adding green leaves to green leaves. The flowers of the cherry tree are no different from the first cherry tree; the same smell as yesterday permeates the air. And—though old people say this is tedious—my sister is kissing someone under the same tree where I used to kiss,
endlessly plagiarizing the first kiss. I could still tell you about the grasses, all the grasses that sprouted from seeds faithfully and persistently, the same, the exact same grass as months ago. The world is not afraid to
plagiarize when making new life, and always equally astonishing and monotonous in its stubbornness is death. Why then condemn poems of love, why blame them for their lack of shame and their primitive, chaotic groans of pleasure, faithfully replicated for centuries, indifferent to who reads them?

Notes:

“It is spring again” was previously published in Peripheries, no. 7.

Read the translator's note by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Article

From the magazine:

On Translating Halina Poświatowska

By Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

May 1, 2026

There’s playfulness and a love of life set against the specter of death.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786622/it-is-spring-again at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

KAROLINA ZAPAL, RYAN MIHALY | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Halina Poświatowska

There’s playfulness and a love of life set against the specter of death.

By Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

In January 1945, when Halina Poświatowska was nine years old, she hid with her family in a damp basement as the Red Army liberated her hometown of Częstochowa. By the time the family emerged three days later, the young girl had developed an illness that would eventually become a then-incurable heart condition (endocarditis and a mitral valve defect). It’s thus no surprise that the heart—both as an abstract source of love and as a physical organ—is central to her poetry.

Poświatowska’s poems evince a keen awareness of the fact that her life would be brief. When she writes “my heart is an autocrat,” it’s clear that she means this quite literally—her heart ruled her life. As a young adult, Poświatowska’s doctor told her that she could not run or dance. Her mother advised her not to fall in love. She did all of these things anyway, though not without great suffering. In her memoir, she recalls going to a dance and collapsing afterward, unable to breathe; only after she had rested for a few days was she able to get on with her life. Later, while in convalescence at a city hospital, she met another heart patient, the young filmmaker Adolf Poświatowski. They fell in love and got married—and he died the following year, succumbing to illness.

Despite these tragedies, Poświatowska’s poems are not exactly tragic. There’s a touch of cheekiness and joy. There’s playfulness and a love of life set against the specter of death. Poświatowska cuts a romantic figure in the Polish imagination, and in Poland her poems continue to be set to music, while her work—four books of poetry, a memoir, and a book of letters—has remained in print for decades.

We took some liberties with these translations, as all translators do. For example, where Poświatowska writes, “moje serce jest władcą absolutnym,” which could be translated as “my heart is the absolute ruler,” we chose “autocrat” instead, as we could not resist the contemporary resonances of the word. Our translation choices were also informed by the sonic sensibility, since “autocrat” ends on a stronger syllable than “ruler” and is thus a bit closer to the sound of the original Polish. In “(will the world die a little),” according to the rules of Polish grammar, “the world” is a masculine noun, so it receives masculine pronouns, even though it is understood that the world is not literally male. This means, in Polish, you hear both “it” and “him” at the same time, while in English, you have to make a choice. We went with the personifying “he” and “him,” hoping to deepen the sense of longing which is present throughout all of Poświatowska’s poetry.

Both poems are from her final book, Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie (“One More Memory”), which was published in 1968, the year after she died of a failed heart operation at the age of thirty-two.

Karolina Zapal is the author of Notes for Mid-Birth (Inside the Castle, 2019) and Polalka (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018).

Read Full Biography

Ryan Mihaly is the author of B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart (New Michigan Press, 2022). He lives in Florence, Massachusetts, with his wife and co-translator, Karolina Zapal.

Read Full Biography

Previous In Issue Next In Issue

Poem

From the magazine:“czy świat umrze trochę”

By Halina Poświatowska

czy świat umrze trochę

kiedy ja umrę

patrzę patrzę

ubrany w lisi kołnierz

idzie świat

nigdy nie myśla…

Poem

From the magazine:“will the world die a little”

By Halina Poświatowska

Translated By Ryan Mihaly & Karolina Zapal

will the world die a little

when I die

I watch him going going

dressed in a fox collar

I could never be

a…

Poem

From the magazine:“moje serce jest władcą absolutnym”

By Halina Poświatowska

moje serce jest władcą absolutnym

ach jak ono się panoszy

przesłania mi cały świat

zagłusza plusk fontanny…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1788129/on-translating-halina-poswiatowska at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

KELLY NORMAN ELLIS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Saturday Class: Fever Dream (George, Breonna, and Trayvon)

By Kelly Norman Ellis

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Race & Ethnicity

Living

Death & Dying

The Mind

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

In the dream, George sits in my poetry workshop.

The class is studying “Those Winter Sundays,” and he stares

At me quietly as the poem rolls from my mouth. He is still dressed in his death clothes.

Black tank top and black pants. He listens. His eyes blink slowly. Somehow,

I know he thinks of  his mother. When I say, What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

He cries.

Sometimes Breonna is there. She has perfectly curled hair with a touch

Of  burgundy on the tips. She speaks sometimes and turns around in her desk

To check on George. Her lips are moving. I can’t hear. I don’t always understand

the language of the dead.

My hands spread open, and I say, I swear to keep the dead upon my mind,

Disdain for all time to be overglad. Gwendolyn Brooks stands in the corner

And nods. Breonna swings around in her desk to look at me. She says, yes. And I can

Hear her now. She wants to write a poem. She says, I need fourteen lines to

Tell you how I loved him.

Who?  I say.

She says, My beautiful one. The one I left.

Breonna is the breath of a sonnet.

I sometimes forget Trayvon is here.

He walks to my desk and puts

A worn piece of notebook paper in my hand. He writes,

I am a seagull. A cloud.

I am dark. I am full of the moon. I am full with

Sun. I am a sky.

I am a star. I am an astronaut. I am

A flying machine. A rocket. A helicopter. A jet.

I am a bee and a hummingbird. Sometimes,

I’m even a fly buzzing around your eye.

Let me fly. I always

Want to be

Flying.

Trayvon nods at me. Walks back to his seat. George is still

Quiet. Eyes still blinking slowly. I close my eyes, spread my hands open

And chant, My best allegiances are to the dead. I repeat and repeat.

When my eyes open, he is staring at me.

His lips move. I can hear him.

He says, I know.

Notes:

With lines from “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “Mentors” by Gwendolyn

Brooks.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

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KELLY NORMAN ELLIS | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Saturday Class: Gwendolyn Brooks and “We Real Cool”

By Kelly Norman Ellis

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U.S., Midwestern

Sandra asks, What does she mean when she say we left school?

She talking ’bout cutting class or dropped out?

I say, What do y’all think?

Summer says, This makes me think of growing up in Lawndale.

We be playing and having a good time in the summer.

I knew everybody. But when school started

Again, there was always somebody missing.

Some of them changed grades,

Some of them started running the streets,

And some got killed.

Sometimes, left just means

left.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786628/saturday-class-gwendolyn-brooks-and-we-real-cool at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

CORNELIUS EADY | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Proof

By Cornelius Eady

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U.S., Midwestern

Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, Jan 1, 2026, NYC.

You have to imagine it:

Who said you were too dark/too

Large? Too queer/too loud?

Who said you were too poor/

Too strange? Too fat?

You have to imagine it:

Who said you must keep quiet?

Who heard your story, then

Rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name

To invisible?

You’ve got to imagine:

Who heard your name

And refused to pronounce it?

Who checked their watch

And said “not now”?

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit

Will not exist

Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,

Roiling town, refresher

And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,

Where the canyons

Whisper in a hundred

Tongues,

New York,

Where your lucky self

Waits for your

Arrival,

Where there is always soil

For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us

The hollers and the rhythms and

The beats of us.

In the echo of our

Ancestors,

Who made certain we know

Who we are.

City of Insistence,

City of Resistance,

You have to imagine:

An Army that wins without

Firing a bullet,

A joy that wears down

The rock of no.

Up from insults,

Up from blocked doors,

Up from trick bags,

Up from fear/up from shame,

Up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine:

That space they said wasn’t yours.

That time they said you’d never own.

The invisible city lit, on its way.

This moment is our proof.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1761421/proof at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

LOVE’S AUSTERE AND LONELY OFFICES

- Galvanizing Textures

- Heedful Hold

- Swift Glimpse

MARCUS JACKSON | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Galvanizing Textures

Street portraits and poetry depicting the unfolding nuances of under-heralded people’s veracity and beauty.

By Marcus Jackson

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Trio on Lunch Walk, 2021.

This collection of photographs and poems, inspired by the indelible Robert Hayden poem “Those Winter Sundays,” explores some of the labor and exactitude required to remain caring, truth-seeking, unwavering, and tender in contemporary American society. Injustices persist, and challenges shift and spawn, yet the most marvelous people among us maintain sure-footed poise or invent radiant, new movements within multigenerational dances.

I began this series in 2020, when, among other conditions and events, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted economic and healthcare inequities, and continued violence by police against unarmed BIPOC community members amplified the challenges of communal and personal existence for Black and Brown people. Mass-media cycles and political-narrative swindlers have been relentless in their one-sided portrayals of minorities. It is only through patience and gentleness that we are able to witness our many textures of grief and brilliance. Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices is a collection of street portraits and poetry made in Columbus, Toledo, and New York City. The project depicts the unfolding nuances of under-heralded people’s veracity and beauty.

Talking Shop, 2021.

Playground with Caution Tape, 2020.

Full Smile, 2020.

Even when life in a towering empire reaches another dimension of disillusionment, songs find ways to resound and people embrace and joke, proving that joy is agile and rightfully theirs.

Even when joint-punishing work is mandatory to assure their families stay housed, fed, and clothed, the flooring installers carry materials and tools from the truck to the garish condominium entrance, and their stride bears the enduring geometry of ushering loved ones steadily toward a distant day of feast and rest.

Carrying Flooring, 2021.

Evening Smoke Outside Statehouse, 2021.

Stop Light Well Wish, 2021.

Even after a tiresome week of hearings, reviews, and floor votes in the Statehouse, the person in the tweed blazer and glasses, who looks like almost none of their white-collar colleagues, savors how the winter has completely thawed, and they smoke a vintage pipe while awaiting the southbound bus.

Even at a stoplight on a street where violence and strife have romped and likely will romp again, someone slows their car to a pause, finds a late morning repose with the windows down, and wishes peace to everywhere their energy will reach.

This sample of photographs attests that societal wrongs and strife continue to be diligently resisted by our love, community care, and self-expression.

Consolation, 2020.

Photographs excerpted from Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices: Street Portraits and Poems by Marcus Jackson (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

This essay is part of the folio “Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices.” Read the rest of the folio in the May 2026 issue of Poetry.

Marcus Jackson is an award-winning poet and photographer who teaches at Ohio State University. Jackson’s fourth book is Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices (Northwestern University Press, 2026).

Read Full Biography

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Poem

From the magazine:Heedful Hold

By Marcus Jackson

An indefinite walk through a long

icy underpass, a bus

elapsing at a velocity that seems

to deform the …

Poem

From the magazine:Swift Glimpse

By Marcus Jackson

Upon another stage of survival and recovery,

we pause and look ahead or look at each other, briefly

distrusting…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1786632/galvanizing-textures at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:44 PM EDT.

MARCUS JACKSON | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Heedful Hold

By Marcus Jackson

An indefinite walk through a long

icy underpass, a bus

elapsing at a velocity that seems

to deform the flank’s advertisement,

the large faces of the ad’s actors

rendered ghostly and moaning.

____

Our work mutates; our children become

disallowed from group play. Our children

schooled via numbing screens. Our children more

quickly adopt the bafflement of adults.

____

Weeping alone, watching a wake

livestreamed on a funeral home’s media page;

the departed—cropped wrongly

by the mounted smartphone—

is someone whose staunch voice and gentle touch

fed many of us, we who shared

their sector of a land wrought

with laws and apathy that hunt us.

____

Where aggressors destroy

for fleeting dollars, when history’s residues,

refurbished injustice, and a virus

collaborate to crush the moss of our sleep,

we hold our babies heedfully,

reconfirming we’re the beautiful kin

of dignity’s many mothers.

Notes:

From Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices: Street Portraits and Poems by Marcus Jackson (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

This poem is part of the folio “Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices.” Read the rest of the folio in the May 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Poem

From the magazine:Swift Glimpse

By Marcus Jackson

Upon another stage of survival and recovery,

we pause and look ahead or look at each other, briefly

distrusting…

Article

From the magazine:Galvanizing Textures

By Marcus Jackson

May 1, 2026

Street portraits and poetry depicting the unfolding nuances of under-heralded people’s veracity and beauty.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786672/heedful-hold at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:45 PM EDT.

MARCUS JACKSON | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Swift Glimpse

By Marcus Jackson

Upon another stage of survival and recovery,

we pause and look ahead or look at each other, briefly

distrusting the resumption of the movements,

the threats, and the music of our streets.

What an empire of unequal labor, misshapen

fame, and loves whose tongues retain

the floodmarks of outswum pain.

The truthful protagonist carries a box

of brake pads, a c-clamp, and a bus pass,

or they use coupons on toothpaste and soap,

or they wash their children’s clothes

while playing old songs that sound exempt

from greed, and their face, in the available light

among sidewalks, alleys, and courtyards,

can send an onlooker a swift glimpse

of the heart’s unembellished excellence.

Notes:

From Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices: Street Portraits and Poems by Marcus Jackson (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

This poem is part of the folio “Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices.” Read the rest of the folio in the May 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

Poem

From the magazine:Heedful Hold

By Marcus Jackson

An indefinite walk through a long

icy underpass, a bus

elapsing at a velocity that seems

to deform the …

Article

From the magazine:Galvanizing Textures

By Marcus Jackson

May 1, 2026

Street portraits and poetry depicting the unfolding nuances of under-heralded people’s veracity and beauty.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1786636/swift-glimpse at Aug 7, 2026 at 12:45 PM EDT.

HARD FEELINGS

- On Disgust: Gurgling Pits

- On Fear: Radiant and Brimming

- On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy

JANE WONG | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Disgust: Gurgling Pits

Disgusting, isn’t it, how much we want to be loved?

By Jane Wong

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Art by Tim Bouckley.

Recently, on a flight from Chicago to Seattle, I watched a young girl in the next row vomit into her father’s hands. Chunks of partially digested food—pink and beige—stuck to her mouth and chin. The father sat there, hands cupped almost as if in prayer, holding his daughter’s perpetually spilling vomit. The smell shot through the recycled air and everyone pinched their noses. Her father kept murmuring it’s OK, it’s OK, holding this stuff that was once inside her. I stared. I did not offer to help, but I didn’t look away either. I felt awful. I wish I had a father who would hold my vomit like it was still a part of me to be loved.

How did vomit lead me to my estranged father? At forty-one, I feel disgusted by my desire to be daughtered by a father who wants nothing to do with me. Disgust swims somewhere in the gurgling pit of shame and desire.

____

I think of this startlingly beautiful description of vomit in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: “The puke swaddles down the pillow onto the sheet—green-gray, with flecks of orange. It moves like the insides of an uncooked egg. Stubbornly clinging to its own mass, refusing to break up and be removed. How, I wonder, can it be so neat and nasty at the same time?”

____

I grew up in a strip mall on the Jersey shore, in a takeout restaurant next to a pizzeria, a liquor store, and a beauty salon. Most kids at school got dropped off in their neighborhood; I got dropped off in the Shrewsbury Plaza parking lot, full of squawking seagulls and loose gravel. Someone once scrawled MEAT IS MURDER on the side of our building, red paint dripping onto thistle weeds. I scrubbed that off, dirt and sweat and paint pooling down my seagull legs. I grew up knowing I was dirty, an abject body before I was even born. My parents immigrated from southern China in the early eighties, fleeing a history of hunger after the Great Leap Forward, when an egg was a rare planet of protein. I grew up eating rotten meat because we simply couldn’t afford to waste it. I worried my house had a smell, that poor Chinese smell—musty towels, old cooking oil, fermenting herbs. I grew up smelling my menstrual blood and watched it gloss my legs, metallic and feral. My debased smell lingers in my armpits, my pussy, my mouth and its cavities, my not knowing which fork to use at a gala I’m invited to as a poet. Who deemed me disgusting? Who deemed me debased?

____

Disgust is not just a feeling. It’s a reflex that lives in the gut. It can make you throw up. In Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion, the psychologist Susan B. Miller writes about disgust as a kind of border control—it draws a line, a boundary, around what we deem repulsive. Miller notes that disgust is deeply tied to smell, taste, and touch. It can also be wielded over you, making strangers decide you are too disgusting to exist. With the history of Yellow Peril and Asian abjection in mind, the scholar Monica Chiu’s Filthy Fictions engages ideas of filth through Asian American feminist literature. She positions dirt as “a national fiction about Others that conflates connotations of worthlessness and rubbish” alongside “the moral defilement in the term ‘filth.’” I like to think I’m among a lineage of Asian American feminist writers upholding disgust as a means of active resistance and radical repulsion.

Kim Hyesoon is one of my most beloved disgusting writers. In an interview with Guernica, the South Korean poet says she “came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship.” Under the conditions of the patriarchy’s demand for cleanliness and beauty arises the need to be as disgusting as possible. In “Nest: Day Fourteen,” from Autobiography of Death, she writes: “Eyebrows: Two maggots trace strands of rain as they move.” These are not neat, even, plucked eyebrows. These are maggots moving in wet rain. Their thick, pus-like bodies writhe on your face. I revel in this tender horror, this romantic disturbance.

____

I have been estranged from my father for so long that I’ve stopped counting the years. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? I’m now around the age my father was when he left our family. When I was little, about nine, I picked up a glass of what I thought was apple juice. When my father saw me drinking his whiskey, he couldn’t stop laughing. I kept drinking that glass of whiskey even though I was disgusted by its gasoline spit. It was worth making my father laugh. After finishing the glass, I laughed with him, our syrupy voices burning with liquor. Disgusting, isn’t it, how much we want to be loved?

____

In my dream of reconciliation, my dream of the impossible, I want my father to cradle my vomit. I want him to see the speckled galaxies within it, to love it so much he would slurp it back up, ingesting all the years we’ve missed. I am reminded of Chen Chen’s poem “Winter,” which begins: “Big smelly bowel movements this blue January morning.” Those “b” sounds in big, bowel, blue, a bilabial stop consonant. How we have to bring the lips together to produce this B  vibration, like those roiling bowel movements. This love poem—and it is a love poem—plays with what we should and shouldn’t write about: “years ago, a teacher said never to use the word ‘poop’ in a poem.” What does it mean to love someone even when they disgust you? What does it mean to say: I will let that touch me, I will let that contaminate me? To not just write about it as a means of resistance, but to relish the visceral sensation of it all?

I think about what disgusts me and how to love its coagulating parts. And how hard it is to separate interior and exterior disgust; does your disgust of me make me despicable to myself? I am disgusted by my desperate desire to be loved, even in abusive relationships. How I’ve slinked back to vile things, vodka breath and unwashed sheets. I am disgusted by month-old moldy leftovers in my fridge, my fear of opening the containers and smelling the ripe hideousness of my wastefulness and inability to throw away such waste. How this comes from my family’s struggle with hoarding—the fruit flies’ sloshing murmuration in my grandmother’s apartment full of collapsed apples and oranges. Her fear of scarcity is my mother’s fear of scarcity is my fear of scarcity.

Yet, something glows in my grandmother’s crates of bad eggs and their urine smell. Something delicious, something pungently unashamed, something transformed into orbs of promised usefulness. The thing is: something always grows in filth. Kim’s maggots will burst into winged things. My menstrual blood can fertilize plants. I come from where I come from, at once a place of leaking trauma and radical love. How dare I be disgusted by what runs through my guts. It is a fertile terror, a teeming custard of poetic possibility. I want to flaunt and flourish in the gagging. To refuse clean language, to swim in the steaming specks of vomit and poop and rot that can offer something transformative and uncontainable.

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

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023) and two books of poetry.

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HANNAH BONNER | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Fear: Radiant and Brimming

Where my ex deemed me unmaternal because of my writing, the opposite is true: I’m no good to anyone if I don’t preserve this one thing for myself.

By Hannah Bonner

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Art by Tim Bouckley.

The first thing I felt wasn’t any emotion I could identify, only the jackhammer of my heart. Though it was late June, I couldn’t stop shivering. The sun streamed through our row home’s bay windows. Bright. Engorged. In another room, my husband hummed, answering a flurry of emails pertaining to his band’s upcoming tour. He would leave in the morning for three weeks, and I was pregnant in an unfamiliar city we’d moved to only a month before. We’ll laugh about this later, I told myself as I walked down the hallway to tell him. This will become the story of  how-we-found-out. We were pregnant and then Dan left. What a riot, I could imagine myself writing. What an absolute scream.

____

I never intended to leave Iowa City, where I’d lived for the past decade. Sometimes I saw more deer in a day than I did people. I wrote three books there over many harsh winters. Sometimes I let myself in through the back door of my best friend Anna’s home and slept on the couch while she and her son dreamed upstairs. I knew every dive bar of that town and the sprawling prairies beyond its limits. But then Dan and I fell in love, and he told me he wanted a family. For the first time in thirty-six years, I could imagine that future.

Now I lived on a block where trolleys clanged down Baltimore Avenue and concerts blasted from the park. There was a stack of prenatal vitamins in the kitchen and a squeezed-out tube of fertility lube by the sink. I was wildly happy and terribly lonely. But the morning after we found out we were pregnant, those feelings metastasized. I was fucking terrified.

____

I’d spent my entire adult life trying not to get pregnant so that I could be a writer on my own terms. There were the years of birth control, the various visits to CVS for Plan B. There was the last boyfriend who refused to get a vasectomy though he adamantly did not want children. There was the boyfriend before him who told me I’d be a terrible mother because I was too focused on my work. And though Dan and I desperately wanted this baby, the size of a poppy seed splitting through me, I was scared before I even named my fear: being a Bad Mom.

You will be, my friend Nina replied without hesitation when I confessed this worry. We all are, at one point or another.

You’ve got this, Anna reassured me over the phone later. You’re going to be great.

Yet, the poets I returned to were mothers who were not considered great: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Tove Ditlevsen—they abandoned their children out of financial precarity, addiction, or mental illness. And while I worried that I would leave, or fail, or disappoint my child in a million unforgivable ways, I hadn’t anticipated another fear that pregnancy delivered almost instantly.

“This is why you were born: to silence me,” Louise Glück declares in “Mother and Child.” Here was my harbinger. When I got pregnant, the first thing I lost wasn’t my appetite or my waistline—it was my desire to write.

____

Where once my brain teemed, now there was just a wordless expanse of nothingness that stretched into The Land of No Ideas. I sat in front of my notebook day after day until I could no longer bear the void. Then I shoved the notebook into the furthest corner of my desk drawer and welcomed the throbbing numbness of endless hours of reality TV. “I don’t want to talk about it, it’s a disease,” Lenù says of her pregnancy in Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name. “I have an emptiness inside me that weighs me down.” The closest comparison I could make to that “emptiness” was depression. But fear is sharp, tannic. I could not wash its taste out of my mouth. Those first few months, I lived in a constant state of high alert with nowhere to rest that terror that also “weigh[ed] me down.

____

In October, Anna started periodically emailing me poems. As if she knew I had only to read her attempts to begin my own. During a bout of insomnia, I reread “Owl” from her collection Long Exposure:

We are afraid of sex now. I no longer offer

myself to you in the morning because there

is no morning, no body to offer.

Later, the poem ends.

I’ve forgotten what to do when I am alone.

I carry water in a glass cup. I think of ways

to kill the owl, ways to make myself come,

but don’t.

I peek at the baby and wish he’d start crying.

I could make him stop.

In “Owl” there “is no morning,” only night. Such darkness presents the possibility of sex or violence. But the speaker sees beyond those provincial pleasures. The final couplet inverts our expectations of a postpartum mother (how often have I misread the penultimate line as “I peek at the baby and wish he’d stop crying”?), and ends, instead with a desire that is at once a threat (how might the mother make the baby stop crying?) as well as an assurance (the good mother is inextricable from the promise of peace). Reading “Owl,” I understood myself as a mother who similarly might straddle chaos and calm, a writer who might also forget what to do when she is alone.

____

Perhaps part of my paralysis surrounding writing is that I have to learn a new vocabulary for this new experience. Where my ex deemed me unmaternal because of my writing, the opposite is true: I’m no good to anyone if I don’t preserve this one thing for myself. To write will always take time, solitude, and ever ongoing work. I know at least this. And in writing, if I am truly honest, I will not always see the light in love or parenthood. I will sometimes be a Bad Mother, both on the page and off.

____

Over the past week, I’ve begun writing to my baby. The poems are short, breathless, sharp flashes of clarity in the otherwise dim chambers of my thoughts. Sometimes the poems are not particularly kind. I do not yet know how to address my child, as Anna does in “Force Majeure”: “I have wasted your childhood,/photographed you too much ... You assure me you will find/me in the next life,/and the one after, that no other/mother will do.” These emotionally capacious lines allow for a duality of guilt and innocence. Whereas the mother in this poem can see only her failures, the son promises that both of them are eternally bound in the dyad of parent and child.

(Perhaps I do not yet know how to address my child because I do not know how they will address me.)

When I search the origins of fear, I find the Latin word reverērī, meaning to “stand in awe of.” What scares me now awaits on the other side of postpartum. Radiant and brimming. Will I be strong enough to bear such awe? Will
I keep writing when I am no longer alone? Will my child also love me? Will no other mother do?

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

Hannah Bonner is the author of Another Woman (EastOver Press 2024). Her criticism has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Another Gaze, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Sewanee Review, among others.

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BORIS DRALYUK | AUG 7, 2026, 12:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy

Surely the experience of immigration reinforced my predilections, but some people are simply born looking backward.

By Boris Dralyuk

Originally Published: May 1, 2026

Art by Tim Bouckley.

Pain is at the core of nostalgia, a term that a Swiss medical student coined in 1688 to diagnose a manifest malady, a homesickness intense enough to dysregulate the heartbeats of mercenaries serving abroad. Some of us are especially prone to such acute symptoms, but all of us, at one time or another, have experienced nostalgia as a proper ache. And yet, that isn’t what makes nostalgia a hard feeling to write about. There is often a sweetness to nostalgia, a sugar coating that, left unchecked, thickens until it obscures the
painful kernel. The longing for a past purified of its faults—or a past we never knew firsthand, encountered only on the page, on the screen, or in tales told to us before sleep or from a podium—becomes an indulgence. What makes nostalgia difficult to treat honestly in poems is how easily some of us fall under its spell.

I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it. This inner conflict—my attraction to the past, my effort to remind myself that the past is always a dream—has guided much of my work as a poet and translator. I suppose I could blame my personal history. Uprooted as a child from my native town of Odesa, Ukraine, thrust into an alien culture, I sought comfort in memories: of playing in the park with herds of cats and one terribly loyal stray dog as the sun set, while old men swapped inflated war stories over games of checkers and dominoes; of racing back from the water of the Black Sea to bite into incomparably flavorful tomatoes sprinkled with salt; of listening to my mother’s guests crack jokes in our warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. The memories grew ever cleaner, ever more pillowy in response to my needs.

Surely the experience of immigration reinforced my predilections, but some people are simply born looking backward. When the theologian Ronald Knox was four years old, he had trouble sleeping. He never made a fuss about it, just stayed in his room. A guest at the house asked what the boy did all night, and he replied, “I lie awake and think about the past.” That was me from the start, and that is me now. Many of my poems are born as phrases that come to me as I do what little Knox did.

I frequently conjure up, as a sobering slap, the image of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, the smalltown lush who “missed the mediæval grace/Of iron clothing,” who “thought, and thought, and thought,/And thought about” the storybook worlds of “Thebes and Camelot.” That fourth thought, coming after the line break, sent Robert Frost and Ezra Pound into a fit of laughter when they first read it. What a terrific dig at the paralysis of the nostalgic. Of course, they knew what kept Cheevy planted on that barstool as well as Robinson did. For all his talk of making it new, Pound was forever digging in the past, forever scorning the present, and, at his canniest moments, mocking himself for it. His Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—“out of key with his time,” striving “to resuscitate the dead art”—is as much a half-
tender, half-devastating reflection of himself as Cheevy was of Robinson.

I love those two poems. It is better to satirize nostalgia, albeit sympathetically, than to swallow it whole. Yet satire isn’t the hardest approach to the subject. The boldest treatment of nostalgia I know belongs to Marina Tsvetaeva, who spent seventeen years in exile after the Russian Revolution. Her searing poem “Homesickness” (1934) begins, in my translation:

Homesickness! Silly fallacy

laid bare so long ago.

It’s all the same where I’m to be

entirely alone—

it’s all the same across what stones

I lug my shopping basket,

toward some house as alien

as a hospital or barracks.

“My native tongue,” the speaker pledges three stanzas later, “will not delude/me with its milky call,” and on she rages for another four stanzas, insisting on her freedom from longing until the very end:

Yes, every house is strange to me

and every temple—barren.

All, all the same. Yet, if I see,

alone along the verge—a rowan ...

Suddenly, the glimpse of the familiar bush in a foreign landscape destroys the speaker’s resistance. Without that closing admission, trailing off into a wordless reverie, her exquisite rant would have remained one-dimensional.
Worse, it would have been dishonest. For even a “captive lion” like this speaker must, from time to time, yield to temptation. Tsvetaeva treats her subject as a hard feeling to be resisted with all one’s might. No surprise. The costs of succumbing to nostalgia’s lure were far greater for her than they were for Robinson. In 1939, she returned to the USSR, although she knew that nation was no longer the one whose destruction she had mourned from Paris. Two years later, hollowed out by the arrest of her husband and daughter, she took her own life.

Yet the stakes are not always so high. Harder still is the challenge of presenting the charm of nostalgia in all its sweetness while hinting at the bitter truth. No one met that challenge more masterfully than Donald Justice, to whom I turn for inspiration more regularly than to any other poet of his generation. Poetic temperaments align unpredictably. I, who came to Los Angeles as a refugee from the USSR in the early nineties, immediately recognized a sensibility I felt to be my own—my voice, my experience of the world—in Justice’s poems of his childhood in Depression-era Miami. One poem in particular, “Dance Lessons of the Thirties” (1988), showed me how to handle nostalgia with integrity. It begins:

Wafts of old incense mixed with Cuban coffee

Hung on the air; a fan turned; it was summer.

And (of the buried life) some last aroma

Still clung to the tumbled cushions of the sofa.

That sofa was “pushed back” during the lessons, recalls the speaker, and the dancers “managed always just to miss” it with their “last-second dips and twirls—all this/While the Victrola wound down gradually.” Everything in the lyric—from the casually varied pentameter (so much like a slow-moving fan), with its surprising yet gentle enjambments (so much like those dips and twirls in a cramped living room), to the perfectly chosen sensory details (the spicy scent in the sultry air, the soft cushions, the drawn-out strains of a record reaching its final rotation)—works to enchant. Like the mechanism of memory for us nostalgists, Justice’s composition smooths out the roughness of the past, elevating snatches of pleasure, suppressing what we would just as soon forget. Suppressing, yes, but not eliminating. Notice the “buried life,” buried in parentheses. These “little lost Bohemias of the suburbs,” as he calls them in the final line, are worlds of desperation, of poverty barely hanging on to gentility. The “brave ladies who taught us/So much of art, and stepped off to their doom/Demonstrating the foxtrot with their daughters” in the depths of the Depression suffer an “exile” less dramatic than that of Tsvetaeva, but no less poignant. Justice dignifies them by not dwelling on their pain, but neither does he deny it. He leaves the sugar coating in place, with only a crack here and there revealing the kernel. Surely, they would have wanted it that way.

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

Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry, 2022). He teaches at the University of Tulsa and is editor-in-chief of Nimrod.

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Table of Contents

Poetry: May 2026

POEMS

Editor’s Note, May 2026

God of Song

Bin by Bin

From Below

The World in Miniature

Sir

Cooking Gas Commercial

Consular Still Life

ithaca

Ластовици

Swallows

Пиперки

Peppers

On Translating Blaže Koneski

Walking Around My Apartment Topless, Boston Wild Turkey and I See Each Other

Althea, it’s waning.

How low did you have to go?

The pale blue waters

[discharge day #1]

Egress [“What is it like,”]

Egress [“With a wrecked heart, I looked at the dipping storm”]

Oh I Thought You Knew, She Said, Dad Is Alive

Everything Will Be Fucked Forever / A Time of Peace* Always Comes Again

Cultural Achievements

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Las cabezas colosales olmecas”]

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“The colossal Olmec heads”]

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“En la luz ambarina”]

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“In the amber light”]

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Si los templos donaran”]

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“If the temples donated”]

From “Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo” [“Las palabras del poema”]

From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“The words of the poem”]

उषा

Dawn

पथरीली घास-भरी इस पहाड़ी की ढाल पर

On a Stony Grass-Covered Hillside

एक आदमी दो पहाड़ों को कोहनियों

A Man Pushes Two Hills

दिन किशमिशी-रेशमी, गोरा

The Day Raisiny

On Translating Shamsher Bahadur Singh

“czy świat umrze trochę”

“will the world die a little”

“moje serce jest władcą absolutnym”

“my heart is an autocrat”

“Tego roku jest znowu wiosna”

“It is spring again”

On Translating Halina Poświatowska

Saturday Class: Fever Dream (George, Breonna, and Trayvon)

Saturday Class: Gwendolyn Brooks and “We Real Cool”

Proof

LOVE’S AUSTERE AND LONELY OFFICES

Galvanizing Textures

Heedful Hold

Swift Glimpse

HARD FEELINGS

On Disgust: Gurgling Pits

On Fear: Radiant and Brimming

On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy