Poetry

  • Grace After Meals

    by Maya Tevet Dayan, translated by Jane Medved

    My father stands over the pots
    in my house, baking sweet potatoes,
    giving me back the taste
    of a world where mothers still exist.

    His hands slice thin answers
    to my …

  • Kanafeh

    by Iman Jaml Arbasy

    I am alone, sitting in a restaurant in Jerusalem.
    I order a Kanafeh for me and my friend—
    who never arrives. The waiter makes a noise when
    he puts the …

  • 1. Opening, from The Burden of Nisan

    by Shimon Adaf, translated by Becka Mara McKay

    The poem carried her
    through time

    she lay reading on the balcony
    on a sun-wombed border

    a chrysanthemum ignited
    the garden’s actuality
    a well of gravity

    birdsong harpooned the air

    even her mother was …

  • Middle School

    by Oak Morse

     

    They’ve gotten my classes     crisscrossed

       sulking here     swallowing the wrong,

          compacted in       the regular classroom.

    I belong

       in a seat that calls my name

               not here      in …

  • Knaackstraße 82, 1996 (Schicksalslied)

    by Monika Cassel

           Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen
                 (Johannes Brahms, Deutsches Requiem/Psalm 84)

           I

    Keusch bewahrt,/ In bescheidener Knospe: In downstairs Berlin bars she meets young men
    while machines rip the city’s …

  • Cling

    by Tobi Kassim

     

    Just gravity pulling what free
    bodies it touches down, and at times
    their refusal. Despite this shaking over
    the mouth of the trash, a plate
    holding its residue. Adherence the …

  • After the Idea of the Flood Recedes

    by Daisy Fried

     

    with borrowings from Rimbaud, “Après le Déluge”

    in a turbulent dream,
    I wake troubled, confused,
    a tabby nosing round the sheets…

    the market stalls are dressed in meat,
    bavetted, boned, …