Why I Need the Birds ~ Lisel Mueller When I hear them call in the morning, before I am quite awake, my bed is already traveling the daily rainbow, the arc toward evening; and the birds, following their own discrete lives of hunger and watchfulness are with me all the way . . . Image […]
African Day ~Gloria de Sant’Ana Translated from Portuguese by Allan Francovich and Kathleen Weaver The crows mark long trajectories in the white day, over the heads of the black singers. There is a scattered wind, scratching in the leaves of the trees, slow melodies of old disgraces. And traces of light from a sun implied […]
The Bride’s Nights in a Strange Village ~Helen Dunmore At three in the morning while mist limps between houses while cloaks and blankets dampen with dew the bride sleeps with her husband bundled in a red blanket, her mouth parts and a bubble of sour breathing goes free. She humps wool up to her ears […]
Hope Chest ~ Elaine Equi It is shaped like a dunce cap It is a bottle of perfume at the foot of a cross. It is a photograph that hums. It is early It is day It is a bed no one has ever slept in. It is just a dream. It is a rosary […]
Black Love ~Gwendolyn Brooks Black love, provide the adequate electric for what is lapsed and lenient in us now. Rouse us from blur. Call us. Call adequately the postponed corner brother. And call our man in the pin-stripe suiting and restore him to his abler logic; to his people. Call to the shattered sister and […]
