Need

Need, frantic need, eagle-taloned need is a pumping drill. 

The oil sloshes to the brim. The lid slams and it's a tanker

spewing smoke. It burps and hisses

into a truck. It barrels through highways. It pours

down underground. It's a gas pump and a car

and a stop and a refill and a continuing.

It pulls over at the side of a tall tree.

It chops and strips and grinds and pounds

until dead fish float downstream

and our need is a single sheet of paper

sliding into a typewriter. It folds and licks

and places three stamps and sends on beating wings

to a door somewhere. A man reads it and fastens

his chin strap, carrying a rifle as bodies

fall and things go up in flames. It finds him

and the coffin lid closes. As soon as it stakes

a cross in salute, the crush comes

squeezing the soil for more. Oh yes,

we need so very much.

 

 

Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner

Translated from the American Sign Language by John Lee Clark

 

Lost Things, Found Hopes

For Nietzsche, hope was the beginning of loss.

But we can be even more radical:
the beginning of anything is the beginning of loss.

We all lose, but some lose more slowly
than others.

‘How’s it going?’ we ask mercilessly.

‘Slowly’, we answer, without really knowing.

Losing slowly is what we call winning.

But I, who do not love losing, love to lose myself in the forest.

Especially in forests
of music and breath,
skin and bark.  

 

--Harkaitz Cano

translated from Basque by Kristin Addis 

I Went Out to Hear

The sound of quiet. The sky 
indigo, steeping 
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before 
the air troubled above 
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly 
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.

--Leila Chatti 

Earlie Body

The rainbow courses through my father and my mother
While they sleep. They are not naked
Not covered by pajamas no sheet whatsoever
They are more like a cloud
In the shape of a woman and man intertwined
Perhaps the first man and the first woman
Upon the earth. The rainbow surprises me
Seeing lizards run between the interstices
Of their bones and my bones     seeing
A sky-blue cotton grow between their brows
Now they can't see me     can't embrace     can't move
The rainbow takes them again
Like it takes my thinking
My youth and my eyeglasses

--Jorge Eduardo Eielson
Translated from the Spanish by Shook

Departure: To the Tune “Mu Lan Hua: Magnolia”

After tonight, what’s left of you is you 

moving into my dream. Outside, the horse hooves

stamping the ground, the dust moves. 

No sorrowful songs for me unless I am drunk.

I am drunk. Forgive me that I couldn’t bear

to see you off, vanishing with the sun. 

Alone with the west wind and the moon. 

Alone listening to the pipa sobbing, its pegbox 

carved into a phoenix. Listen, crying bird: 

To live without this grief is to see the mountain 

without its weight, rivers without depth. 

 

--Zhang Xian

Translated from the Chinese by Shangyang Fang

V

I promised my wife that I would call Dr. Song today. After putting Mira down for her nap and slipping outside for a smoke, I lifted the receiver. The sound it emitted, which I have heard without pause countless times before, seemed to me otherworldly now, like somebody’s finger playing on the wet rim of a crystal bowl in a derelict theater before the wars.

It’s hard to say how long I stood there listening. It may have been seconds or seasons. The rings of Saturn kept turning in their groove. For reasons beyond me—our seminar had already moved on from late medieval Europe to developing world underworlds—I dialed 1-800-INFERNO, and before the first ring, a woman’s voice answered in heavily accented English.

“Is it you?”

“I think so,” I replied. Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their pale spinning leaves in real time. Focusing on one as it fell seemed to slow the general descent.

“Oh creature, gracious and good,” the faraway lady recited, as if reading, against her will, from a prepared text, “traversing the dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood.” I could hear rain trickling in a gutter spout on the other end of the line.

“Please,” I said into the receiver, “remove my name from your list.”

 

--Srikanth Reddy 

Some of the Questions to Consider

 

Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you? It's hard to know which is worse, the nightmare of approaching tornadoes or waking from the dream your parents were alive in. Enter the ominous music announcing the shark. It is best to disappear into one's work. Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested, mentioning other things besides wine but most people ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue? Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best but to be misunderstood is not the goal. I don't need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said, and drew his wife's face exploding into spheres. What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look, said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak. We're all afloat in the same solution. Would you like to trade some molecules with me? Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains 7 octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go? Not yet, not yet. Let's meet for an aperitivo. Let's build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.   --Kim Addonizio