Heroes Congress Issues | Editors' Issues | |||
[Issue 1.0] | Section 2: Issue 22 | |||
Editors' Issues: | ||||
Section 1: Issue 21 |
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JANE HIRSHFIELD
I Wanted Only A Little |
US |
two teaspoons of silence— one for sugar, one for stirring the wetness. No. I wanted a Cairo of silence, a Kyoto. In every hanging garden mosses and waters.
The directions of silence: north, west, south, past, future.
It comes through any window one inch open, like rain driven sideways.
Grief shifts, as a grazing horse does, one leg to the other.
But a horse sleeping sleeps with all legs locked. |
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AFRIC MCGLINCHEY
Precipitation |
IE |
ribboning swathes, like a woman’s sorrows multiplying.
remembering his hands gesturing, like a mathematician’s in skilled divisions.
She thinks of the mouth she kissed, the mudflat drawl, so profane, enticing.
anguish toppling, weekly, into her handkerchief pocket.
She doesn’t garden but sits on the fierce rough steps. In the fields, horses grazing, black and white. From recesses, her secret love shimmers recognition.
The sofa cushion’s body language. She keeps the part of him that loved to dance, his langorous arms, as she casually gave her virginity.
The rain sees it all, one flight after another striking the rock.
She wonders if, during the weather, he still remembers. |
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SIDNEY WADE
Bejeweled |
US |
Corvus Marinus (the water crow)
rises from below after storming
through a swarm of minnows
and lifts its head and turns just so
the radiant
blue jewels in its eye-ring--
tiny sapphires and diamonds
in a scintillant show, marine
and corvine bling.
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THOMAS MCCARTHY
Agapanthus |
IE |
As we dared the wet earth in our wet digging clothes. The late Mrs. Cockburn was in no mood to chat. It was she, After all, who was being evicted by a cruel remote-control: A letter sent from Toronto that saw the summer spoilt. She had just published a good book, her autobiography That kept her friends straight and her enemies crooked, But as if the world needed to show a woman of quality What indifference meant, or how landlords could still be shit, The letter was not an offer for film rights but a notice to quit. We approached the bed of agapanthi in a deathly quiet. What I thought was umbellatus and a big mistake For the small place where she was headed was, as a matter Of fact and not any other kind of insufferable organic fact, A huge clump of the smaller orientalis, sometimes called Agapanthus mooreanus, and perfect, as I should have Known. I knew that Mrs. Consuela White was up in Lismore And would soon be on the phone to me. Mrs. Cockburn Also knew that, though they were old friends, Mrs White’s chilling Remarks, her wicked shaudenfreude, could kill African lilies. |
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MING DI
China Moon |
US |
washing dishes, clothes, and bedding, and rush back
left by her mother. She washes. An extra plate a new moon. She counts days. Waits. Will he come again?
grabs a basket and runs. Time now becomes clear, roadside corn is taller than her body. She wants to watch. The wedding. See him kiss the bride. With her own eyes. With no jealousy. Then
head home, listen to the sound of china breaking into pieces. Translated from the Chinese by Katie Farris with the author. |
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STEPHEN YENSER
The Relic |
US |
Library vault unlocked, our friend the curator picks out a casket that opens brashly on the lock of hair: a curl of bright auburn (“bold, like the Chestnut Burr,” she’d offered, turning inner outer, merging husk and kernel).
A banked fire burning. An urgent yearning, an awful favor rises . . . I’m dying to ask it. |
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JENNIFER KWON DOBBS
Northern Corea Postcard |
US |
Demilitarized Zone
who led you to this balcony. Don’t cry, she said on the stairs,
They win when they see you cry. So you gaze at a plank
marking the center between north and south. You study the wood’s grain,
its slightly skewed position due to time, and you guess its weight,
how many winters it lay there in the sand witnessing
the same spectacle patrol its length. You want to measure how far
to your father’s house in Seoul, your mother’s house in Daegu
to your hotel in Pyongyang near the Ministry of Commerce—maps
that prove you know the intimate distances that bind your heart here
to the young woman’s standing next to you. Her stoicism is not yours,
yet her advice feels true. They win when you see only tears.
*For Caitlin Kee. |
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MARC VINCENZ
Ivan Sinks into the Honeycomb |
US |
Ivan has lost his chords and sinks into the shallows, into the impressions of mollusks and seasnails, hangs his head in his hands as if he wants to hold on to it. He knows what I think of him, the hoarder of things he once was, the hoarder of memories he has become. It’s too heavy, he mutters as if to the spinning minnows and the jellied eggs of crustaceans yet to become. And what of Tatjana, he mumbles scratching a face in the sand; the shadow of the wall now hovers over his skull like a hive burning alive in honeybees— as if I had answers, as if I might become soothsayer, groundbreaker (when all that’s left is you, you become everything or nothing). If only we’d always lived cut- off on an island, he spits, sinking into the honeycomb, drifting far away from me. |
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ALLISON JOSEPH
Ode to the Red Dress |
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A woman in a black dress is mourning, no matter where she goes in sky-high heels or sweet sashay.
A woman in a red dress is lighting her skin from within, sending radiance, diligence--fingertips sleek over a slide of curves.
The red dress dances while the black dress sulks, the red dress pops its buttons while the black dress denies you its zipper, guarding
everything with a smirk, finite dismissal of a wave. Beast of a color, transfer of heat and power, light blush to quick flame,
the red dress giggles, unafraid of wine, sweat, scandals. Take that red dress out of your closet and put it on your body
where it belongs, so your blood can divulge its secrets. A woman in a red dress has no need of secrets,
of shame, of the sour hurt that could mark her face like a bruise, a scar. A woman in a red dress
is a vice, a crevice, space you beg to occupy, empty box now full thermometer's mercury now burst from slender glass. |
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Copyright © 2010 - 2015 Dublin Poetry Review: Éigse Átha Cliath.
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