SILVIA PIO Get ready to start again, or better, to be reborn. Sharpen your sword and wait, alert and aware, the coming of new challenges. But treat the enemy kindly, be they outside or inside you. Dare to open new…
SILVANO GREGOLI I recently witnessed two unusual events. Unusual in themselves, first; then doubly unusual because, although random in nature, they were mysteriously connected. The first event took place in the waiting room of a barbershop in Italy. As I…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN The evening star Hey, we’ve got a guitar. So let’s have a song. Once we’re sozzled we can totter off home. You sang old songs. I strummed on a guitar. We reminisced. We mixed up fact and fable.…
Poems by Rose Ausländer, Gioconda Belli, Mario Benedetti, Francisco Brines, Paul Celan, Kim Chi-ha, Cho Byung-Hwa, Kamala Das, Miguel Hernández, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Erich Fried, Ernst Jandl, Sarah Kirsch, Xavier Villaurrutia, Ida Vitale, Adam Zagajewski but also important modern…
Michael (Dickel) Dekel, a poet and an artist SILVIA PIO (edited by) *** At the Cemetery The distraught woman bends over the disturbed ground, screaming at the man just interred there— cries of good-bye and how-could-you, pulled from deep inside,…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE There’s a hole in the heart of Piazza. Our farmacia storica has closed its door under the portici, the metal gates pulled tight. The hand-painted sign remains above, as if some other pharmacy might come along to…
MICHAEL ROTHENBERG When I was 17 years old living in Miami Beach reading Michael McClure’s Meat Science Essays, I never in my wildest imagination thought that some day I would be running a bromeliad and orchid nursery in California and…
VIV LONGLEY Scar Tissue Mum told me I fell off my trike charging down the orchard, pretending I was a horse. I failed to gallop round the fence, and landed in the nettle patch. My skin remembers. I still reach…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN I wrote this poem in 2020, immediately after hearing Olesya’s extraordinary and beautiful renderings of poems by ten Ukrainian poets: Iryna Starovoyt, Olech Lysheha, Yury Izdryk, Marianna Kijanowska, Kateryna Babkina, Lyuba Yakimchuk, Yurii Andrukhovych, Halyna Kruk, and Serhiy…
“Two thousand Italian partisans took the city of Alba on October 10, 1944, and two hundred lost it to the Fascists on November 2.” Beppe Fenoglio was among them, but he wrote this book in a scandalous (for the times)…
SILVIA PIO (edited by) Like A Rolling Stone Bob Dylan 1965 “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” This saying refers to someone who is always travelling and changing jobs. These people have the advantage of having no responsibilities and cares, but…
ARTHUR SZE Lichen Song —Snow in the air you’ve seen a crust on the ceiling wood and never considered how I gather moisture when you step out of the shower you don’t care that I respire as you breathe for…
The Iraqi poet Salah Niazi (SILVIA PIO, edited by) DISCO Drumbeats smash into their echoes and shatter like the screams of broken trees. To and fro, as if the flames licks the wood first; Again lick the wood and again…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE A few words—very few–as any attempt by me to make sense of or draw neat conclusions about 2021 seems presumptuous, futile, and redundant. It’s been a year, four seasons and 365 days, events unique and mundane, day…
AGBRIGG WRITERS By four we’ve closed the shutters By four we’ve closed the shutters Light’s fled the skies Throughout the ailing autumn We watched it go sadly and painfully. Now blessed solstice dawns Not just the shortest day But life’s…
