Sometimes you are carried by the wreckage

of your own ship—as helpless to direct this

flotsam as you were when it was floorboards

that lurched beneath disquiet cries of shorebirds.

By Kiersten Czuwala

After dinner, my boyfriend tells me that I should learn to slaughter my own meat.

That actually, farmers have pinpointed down to the angle

exactly how to position a barrel against a cow’s skull

to flood the hollow of the bullet hole

with serotonin.

By Luci Arbus-Scandiffio

Being a baby, I think, was like that–looking up and out

at something like a sea wall

feeling waterlogged

feeling nearly extinct

my face shiny like a seal’s face.

By Ivy Char

It was Celia who first called me H. Although we were close, having known each other since kindergarten, I had learned to stray from topics that might turn to points of contention, as was apparently the case with the letter. And besides, there existed the distinct possibility, advanced by the satisfied look on her face, that this was all some sort of friendly challenge. “Why ‘H?’” I wondered, and wondered often.

By Avot Yeshurun, translated by Dan Alter

A day will come no-one reads my mother's letters.
A pile I have of them.
Not from a her
No word.

By Fran Matos

The skeleton in my neighbor's front yard
holds a sign that reads “come closer for a spell”
but I’m not looking for signs anymore.

By Kerry Kurdziel

The surcharge for being alive
has risen again. The bells won’t stop
weeping. We keep sinking
each other and calling it
tragedy -

By Kaci X. Tavares

It’s been too long since I’ve tried to write my Chinese name 黃曉殿 Húang Xǐaodìan. Muscle memory—barely. In Chinese, your family name comes first, the unit identified before the individual. My family: orphaned sisters who borrow a benefactor’s name. Me: Daybreak over a Palace. I cannot find the palace—

By Salvador Espiru, translated by Andrew Kaufman and Antonio Cortijo Ocana

After, when it had already
caused me much harm and
I could do almost nothing but smile,
I chose the simplest
words, to tell myself

By Alex Wexelman

Rivera wrote on her official website, “Growing up, I was steeped in the oral tradition,” the inflection evident in her confident prosody. 

By Saúl Hernández

I lick every drop of sperm off a white man"s navel, / put my lips on his shaft, / his hand grips the back of my neck, / I open my mouth to swallow again, / Tell me something in Spanish. / Sound of my slob in the air, / Tell me something / in Spanish, Tell me / something in Spanish, / Tell me something / in Spanish. /That’s how English asphyxiates me.

By Aura Christi, translated by Gabi Reigh

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
The pleasant tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
A white vulture splits the window
And its wax shadow tips
The whole house skywards.

By Alex Wexelman

In 1982, Eavan Boland wrote an essay titled “On Religion and Poetry” for The Furrow, a monthly journal for the contemporary Church. Eleven years later, The Columbia Journal reprinted the tract in its No. 18/19 issue.

By Madeleine Voge

I was never chosen to be the naptime fairy, the one who tiptoed around the classroom and waved a wand with bells on the end of it because instead of curling up and closing my eager eyes, I stacked blocks and whispered with Brooks, the boy with long eyelashes who was allergic to bees.

By Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy

Dr. Dutka, who knew nineteen languages
(and with dialects, spoke twenty-four),
reflected the entire world, like an ancient mirror,
and sued his grandchildren for apartment space.

By Owen Torrey

They always arrived in the morning. If there was snow the night before, that is. That winter, there was. They appeared through the window above the sink on the hill. Slashing upwards in loose diagonals. Often in pairs. Often alone. I was alone.

A still life of a glass a lemon-squeezer half / a lemon and a little pot with drinking straws / and the light, so Picasso described one / of his paintings in a letter.

By Matthew Gonzalez

I was at a loss for words when I first read Gonzalo Rojas’s “Numen.” I couldn’t find any solid ground in the distance between the images he uses. After a dive into the body of Spanish-language criticism of Rojas, it’s my position that to evade meaning is the meaning of “Numen.”

“What would the history of literature look like if it began, not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes, but with a woman from ancient Iraq, who sang her hymns to […]

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018). She translates contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy and is Assistant Professor of English […]