SPELL FOR ELSEWHERE
An angry bleat urges me to fasten the seatbelt, metronomic click
of the blinker punctuating its screech-song. The windows are down
& the rain drips onto my thighs. It brings me back to the body
in spatters. On the highway, I let three people merge & not one
waves. I am out of wiper fluid again & get lost on Ward Parkway.
A different me is silhouetted in the lit windows of every house I drive
past – me: reading a book, me: making dinner, me: alone staring back.
A. N. DEJESÚS is a proud second-generation Dominican-American poet and technical writer working out of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems appear in the Los Angeles Review, Permafrost, Bear Review, Cider Press, Luna Luna Magazine, and the Best of the Net Anthology (2019), among others. She has recently earned a Master of Arts in English Literature and Rhetoric from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was the recipient of the Helen and Emily Nguyen Creative Award and attended a fellowship at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
Read more by A. N. DeJesús
Author’s Website
Poem at The Growler (audio)
On Twitter at @amand_nah
I was the last place on the planet /
where astronauts slept /
my last customers were the planet’s /
last people
"The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem."
Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?
That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.
There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs /
and various birds anas crecca, /
there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks /
and the cracking of pinecones
Herewith a fresh selection of our favorite recent poetry, fiction, and biography in translation from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.
For a moment, she wondered where all dead birds go when they die, which probably happens every minute of every hour, so really, birds should be falling from the sky not just from time to time, but raining down constantly, over both deserted and inhabited areas...
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
His astonishing, indeed quite singular ability to touch the tip of his nose with his teeth was something he discovered almost inadvertently
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
