New Verse Review Issue 3.2: Translation, Spring 2026, Poems

Like a round injera, I cut his love

in two. But half is not enough for me,

so I eat what I meant to give. I take

from the hungry, give back to the needy.

I pity, I give; I am stingy, I keep.

I see pity and greed because of him.

I say, let earthly injera be bountiful

like manna falling from the sky.

Note: the first of Kebedech Tekleab’s poems in Amharic is written in regular 6 syllable lines with an interlacing end-rhyme scheme. The second is in mostly rhyming 12 syllable lines, except lines 2 and 3 which are half lines. We have used 5 and 4 beat lines to convey a similar effect, with half or internal rhymes. We have also added an extra line because the Amharic is so packed! It is in fact a q’ene poem, what Ethiopians call wax and gold, where the love interest is hidden beneath an everyday moral dilemma. The original poem does not mention love at all, but suggests it through the injera (the unleavened pancake-like bread which is the basis of every meal and often a metaphor for love) and the reference to him in the 6th line. We decided we had to make the connection explicit or lose the sense for a non-Ethiopian reader.

Chris Beckett is a British poet and translator who grew up in Ethiopia and is now based in London. His collections are Ethiopia Boy (2013) and Tenderfoot (2020), both from Carcanet, plus with Alemu Tebeje the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees (Carcanet, 2020). His website is https://www.chrisbeckettpoems.com/.

Hiwot Tadesse is a translator both from and into Ethiopian Amharic, based in Addis Ababa. Among her many published works is an Amharic version of Hama Tuma’s BBC award-winning short stories, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor; Jordanos Seifu Estifanos’ ethnographic travel journal Wayfarers, and Bedilu Wakjira’s much-loved long poem Awnet malet new, yene lij / Truth, my child (included in Songs We Learn from Trees).

Alemu Tebeje is a British-Ethiopian poet, translator and social worker based in London. His collections include Greetings to the People of Europe (bilingual edition, Tamrat Books, 2018) and Abba Silaserwat (Addis Ababa, 2022), plus the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees (Carcanet, 2020), shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

Kebedech Tekleab is a poet, painter, and sculptor. As a student, she was forced to flee Ethiopia in 1979 and walk through the Ogaden desert, where she was captured by Somali soldiers and held in a concentration camp for ten years. Eventually, she arrived in the USA, where she studied art at Howard University in Washington, DC, and then worked as a studio artist and college professor. In 2008, she moved to Georgia to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Currently, she is a tenured associate professor of art at the City University of New York, Queensborough Community College, New York. She has had exhibitions at institutions such as the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC; the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre in Skokie, Illinois; Columbia University in New York; and the American University Museum, Washington, DC. She has published two collections of poetry in Amharic.

Bedilu Wakjira is a prominent Ethiopian poet, writer and academic whose work has been extremely influential in modern Amharic literature. He studied linguistics in Addis Ababa, did his PhD in Norway and is currently professor of language and literature at Addis Ababa University. He has published short stories, essays and three collections of poems, including Fekat Nafeqiwoch (Those who long for spring) and Yetesfa Kitbat (The Hope Vaccine). His YouTube channel is: https://www.youtube.com/@BediluPoetry.

rocks are going to

collapse in your eye

the sea extends to your hands

breezily both salt and thirst

while the southern winds

hunt after the trees

the double-faced sea

and the earth turned upside down

skylarks at the break of day

waves moving through sky

or the passage of Shan

toward the inaudible night

the rhythm’s crescent

(7)

perhaps you cannot

live in your language without

living somewhere else

and how do you live

somewhere else without living

the strange native tongue?

I neared your body

as words verge upon the breath

verged upon your flame

(10)

o with meager words

perhaps not one syllable

flame rips you open

the languorous wind

barely flows down the river

what did you know of the light?

you’ve given your breath

to language and with that death

alone do you live

(168)

(Sarkis Khatchents Editions, Yerevan, 2021)

A prolific poet, novelist, essayist, and literary critic, Krikor Beledian is the pre-eminent writer of contemporary Western Armenian literature. He studied philosophy and esthetics at the Sorbonne, and is the author of more than forty volumes, which have been published in the Middle East, Europe, Armenia, and the United States. Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide. In his poetry, Beledian braids his native Western Armenian with non-Armenian poetic forms—mainly the mantra in Mantras (Yerevan, 2010) and the haiku in Traces of Light (Yerevan, 2020). Beledian’s haikus, while loyal most of the time to the metric requirements of the form, reveal another kind of disruption: the haiku, says Beledian in the Afterword to the volume, tries to “find a solid ground for the unstable situations of expulsion, immigration, if not exile.”

Christopher Millis's poetry has appeared widely in the United States and Europe. The recipient of awards from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Arts Council, his books include Impossible Mirrors, Diary of the Delphic Oracle, and his translations from the Italian of Umberto Saba’s The Dark of the Sun, for which he received a Fulbright Grant. Millis’s translations with Taline Voskeritchian have appeared in the London Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Wasafiri, Los Angeles Review of Books, and International Poetry Review. They have translated more of Krikor Beledian's work for The Common. The former art critic for The Boston Phoenix, he is the author of four Off Broadway productions, including the libretto for Jean Erdman’s dance opera The Shining House and Garbage Boy, first produced in 2006 by the New York International Fringe Festival. He has taught at Boston University, New York University, and Fordham University.

Taline Voskeritchian has published widely in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East; her prose and translations have appeared in the London Review of Books, The Nation, Bookforum, The Daily Star/International Herald Tribune, Journal of Palestine Studies, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. Voskeritchian’s translations with Christopher Millis have appeared in the London Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Wasafiri, Los Angeles Review of Books, and International Poetry Review. They have translated more of Krikor Beledian's work for The Common. She is a co-producer of Վահէ Օշական՝ Միջնարար (Vahé Oshagan: Between Acts), an experimental documentary on the modernist Armenian poet Vahé Oshagan, to which she also contributed as translator. She has taught at Boston University, the Museum School of Boston, American University of Armenia, and conducted translation seminars in Palestinian universities with the Palestine Festival of Literature.

I sought for the circular horizon of the islands

I found only a sky closed off by illusions

I sought the horizon arching in desire

And the muses in the night making their incursions

The artist and the public like opposites attract

A clean breath of air amid all the pollution

Like an archaeologist, his ear to the earth

Searches for treasure as some kind of solution

I walked until day over a dead volcano

At each of my steps the sound of eruption

I exchanged glances and each glance bore a dream

But one by one their eyes were averted in revulsion

This is how it happens that hopes have come to die

Dazzled by the glare and fire of seduction

The freest of souls breaks the rules of engagement

But even the eagle has a fear of restriction

On the road to oneself or on the way to India

Each interpretation grants certain assumptions

The world speaks of art as you speak of your exes

Like a house lying empty after an eviction

It’s a natural instinct, the heart wants to help

Without a discount voucher or advertised reduction

To encounter the world, you bring people together

If you want results, you have to make connections

Life has no price, it is the perfect setting

Far from the roar of neon, the dance of corruption

The heart of a lover, the skill of a craftsman

The distance covered depends on the momentum

Philosophy sits weeping, stifled in her rags

Singled out and mocked for stumbling elocution

Whether we let her drop or stop to leave a comment

So many communities so far from a communion

Once upon a time was the final tale of all

Witnessing the words designed for mutilation

Luxury vulgarity, indecency's ascension

The poor taste of Rome in the days of the centurions

They sign contracts the way you’d seal a deal

VAT submissions, working out deductions

I sought the circular horizon of the islands

I found only a sky closed off by illusions.

It’s snowing in my garden

Snowing autumn leaves

It’s raining at half speed

As if upon the sea.

Pens and feathers by the ton

On my garden, once so sober:

It’s raining leaves of autumn

And pages of October.

The forest now is slipping off

Her lovely umber gown

It’s raining in another clef

The snow is coming down

After drinking down

The ink of inspiration

I’ve come to read upon the ground

What the wood has written

In my garden snow

Falls like flakes of light

It’s raining in slow motion

As on the mountain height

The sun shines in my garden

And the great trees understand

I came to carve these words

In marble and in sand

In my garden burns

Like a bar of incense

A divine haze

Which scents all the world

The world of flowers, the world of beasts

From earth up to the sky

As if prayers themselves now seek

Creatures to be said by

It’s raining October leaves

Upon my calendar

The brightness of a star

Shone for you as it leaves

The wind blows in my garden

As on the ocean wild

Where the blue surge unburdens

The storm-wind’s ancient child

The wind blows in my garden

As through an empty space

Where life begins again

And far away escapes

In my garden life is good

Eternity is everyday

The breath of the tall trees make us move

But as they stay, we stay

It’s raining feathers by the ton

In my garden, once so sober

It’s raining leaves of autumn

And pages of October

Souleymane Diamanka is a Senegalese poet who moved to Bordeaux in France as a child. His recent collections include Habitant de nulle part, originaire de partout (Seuil, 2021), De la plume et de l’épée (Seuil, 2023) and 50 sonnets pour mes 50 printemps (Multikulti, 2025). With a background in slam poetry, his earliest work is also available as an album (L’Hiver peul, 2007).

Victoria Moul is a poet, critic and translator living in Paris. She writes about poetry and translation weekly on her substack Horace & friends. Her most recent publications are A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry (CUP, 2022) and Poems Beautiful & Useful (Headless Poet, 2026).

Many nations she has ruled,

Victoria, beneath her crown,

And customs, peoples, she has schooled,

Before this square of ill renown.

Enough: myths fade, and it’s no joke

Reviving them. At the Lapiths’ feast,

Wine the seducer, at a stroke

Made wedding, farce; our nature, beast.

Find the culprit in the crowd,

Barren lady, heirless queen,

Seeking the meal he is allowed:

The chickpea, and the shriveled bean.

O Theseus, king and immigrant,

Whose city is this that you rent?

Note: This sonnet, written in the depths of the Greek economic crisis, also seems to prefigure the refugee crisis of a couple of years later. Victoria Square (named after Queen Victoria) is a central square in Athens in what was once a prosperous bourgeoise area lined with neoclassical mansions, but which is now a shabby, run-down neighborhood, peopled with a mix of economic migrants, Greek pensioners, and refugees. The square is dominated by a monumental bronze statue of “Theseus Saving Hippodamia,” by Johannes Pfuhl (1908), in which Theseus is saving the Lapith bride Hippodamia from a drunken centaur. (Centaurs could not hold their drink, and wine served at the wedding famously led to rape and pillage.) Theseus was the son of the king of Athens, a city of sanctuary, but was raised outside the city, and returned to it as an immigrant, before being recognized as King.

The flesh, and blood of flesh, and then the fly

Who lays her eggs thereon, and I compliant:

Beyond the Propylaea, I did not pry,

Faithful, ever faithful, ever client.

I found them all, I saw them there, of course,

Thin, half-clothed in drapery, and keeping

The temple up, and somehow by sheer force

Holding on to life. And there a sleeping

Bat was hanging underneath the ceiling.

I held two punctured coins, and for their sakes,

I eyed the figures curiously, appealing,

“Who knows the contagion? What makes

Us people who bow down to this disease,

In any body, mine or yours, or these?”

Note: In 2012, during the economic crisis, Greek police rounded up hundreds of alleged sex workers and gave them compulsory HIV tests; 30, who tested positive, were charged with a felony for intentionally causing bodily harm. The humiliation of the vulnerable women was captured in “Ruins: Chronicle of an HIV Witch Hunt,” a film by Zoe Mavroudi. This poem conflates the women with the Caryatids of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, weathered women of stone who hold the temples entablature on their heads. The Propylaea, the massive entrance gates to the Acropolis, housed the altar of Hygia, the goddess of health, possibly placed there as a votive during the 5th century plague of Athens that devastated the city during the Peloponnesian war.

These sonnets are taken from Doukas’s The Stendhal Syndrome (2013, Athens), published by Polis, a book of ekphrastic sonnets that simultaneously engages with the Greek economic crisis of 2009-2019.

Yiannis Doukas was born in Athens in 1981. He studied Greek Philology, Classics and Digital Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Galway, where he worked on intertextuality in Late Greek Epic and its digital representation. So far he has published three books of poetry: At Inner Borders (Polis, 2011, Diavazo journal Debut Poetry Collection Award), The Stendhal Syndrome (Polis, 2013, G. Athanas Award of the Academy of Athens) and thebes memphis (Polis, 2020). He has also written the lyrics for two songs by Thanos Mikroutsikos, included on In the Fog of the Times (2017), his final album. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, such as Austerity Measures (edited by Karen Van Dyck, Penguin, 2016), and has been translated into Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish.

A.E. Stallings is a US-born poet, translator, and essayist living in Greece. She has published four volumes of verse, and a selected poems (This Afterlife, FSG), and three volumes of verse translation, most recently The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (Paul Dry Books). She has also recently published a book on poets and the marbles of the Parthenon, Frieze Frame. A Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, she is currently serving a term as the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Rita Kogan was born in 1976 in St. Petersburg, Russia and immigrated to Israel in 1990. She lives in Tel Aviv. “Demon” is from her third book of Hebrew verse, Machalat yabashah (Mal de terre, 2022). She has also published a collection of short stories as well as Hebrew translations of classic Russian poets including Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pushkin.

Michael Weingrad is the author of Eugene Nadelman: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse. He translates contemporary writing from Israel, and co-edited a special issue in English translation of the Jerusalem poetry journal Yehee. A professor of Jewish literature, he recently completed a scholarly book about Jews and fantasy literature. He also writes at Screen Splits, a Substack on the history of divorce in American film.

Is Gandhi’s path still good to go,

his lack of fear still in your heart?

What’s your answer, yes or no?

To kill the fear or let it grow,

to brazen it or fall apart?

Is Gandhi’s path still good to go?

Reject the battlefield and so

preserve the weak from being slain?

What’s your answer, yes or no?

Might non-violence stem the flow?

Will things remain as at the start?

Is Gandhi’s path still good to go,

or is his lonely path too slow

for one life to attempt again?

What’s your answer, yes or no?

And should I tread the path I know

would any other still complain?

Is Gandhi’s path still good to go?

What’s your answer? Yes or no?

a blob of spit and fag ends by a puddle

a field of bottle-caps greets the joyful dawn,

in deepest Golgotha a brewery,

a furious clatter, bin spilled on the lawn

a heap of rotting ham between two windows

inside, momma and papa going at it like blazes,

a crisis concerto in the council house

under whose wall an ancient pisshead lazes

he starts trembling as soon as the shop opens

whatever thoughts were weighing him down, they’re gone,

he buys a bottle, takes it, opens it, gobs it,

his lips shimmer like mud pools in the sun,

strange little graffiti glisten there like jewels

Arnie is nuts and – look there! – Jesus rules.

Virág Erdős was born in Budapest in 1968. She writes poems, short stories and plays for both adults and children. Her recent poetry books include: Hősöm (My Hero) (2020), Erdős Virág könnyei (The Tears of Erdős Virág) (2022), Eltérő tartalom (Different Content) (2024), and Kalocsa (2025). As well as writing for the page, she often performs her work. often appearing for opposition causes as a fierce critic of the Orbán government. She has worked with and directed musicians performing her lyrics, and her poems and plays have been translated into various languages. She has won various prizes for her work.

Vörös István, born in 1964, is one of the most celebrated Hungarian poets of his generation. Along with ten collections of poems, he has also written essays, reviews and short stories. He has been awarded Hungarian and Czech prizes such as the Füst Milan Prize and recently Prague’s Premia Bohemica for his translations of Czech writers, among them Miroslav Holub, Ivan Wernisch, Petr Borkovec and Vladimír Holan. His own work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Italian, Slovenian, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian and Czech.

Winner of many major prizes, Anna T Szabó (also known as Anna Szabó T., and in Hungary as Szabó T. Anna) is a poet, writer and translator. She was born in Transylvania (Romania) in 1972 and moved to Hungary in 1987 where she studied English and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest. She has published eight volumes of poetry for adults and nine for children, written three books of short stories, twelve plays, and has received several literary prizes. She is an elected member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts (part of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). She lives near Budapest with her husband the novelist György Dragomán and their two sons.

George Szirtes (born 29 November 1948) is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. He has won a variety of prizes for his work, most recently the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, for his collection Reel, and the Bess Hokin Prize in 2008 for poems in Poetry magazine. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards. In 2025 he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

To see a thousand-year-old form that bears

witness over centuries—in order

to say that they’ve remained like gusts of air,

so wonderful, so marvelous before their

demise, bursting with light, and held within

a sonnet—moves me, and it makes me feel

just how much history I’ve never known

and that the more I miss the more congealed

my heart becomes. I write for people who

will discuss the mystery that binds

us all to everything and nothing too:

The world’s inside a sonnet, breaking through,

but fleetingly. It mimics, in my mind,

a pathway that leads us to what is true.

D.A. Cooper is a poet and translator from Houston, TX. He enjoys translating poetry from Italian as well as from other languages of the Italian peninsula. His translations from Milanese, Sicilian, and Venetian have been published in a variety of journals. His original poetry has recently appeared in Forgotten Ground Regained, Modern Age, and Wayfare, among others. He is an associate editor at New Verse Review.

Mary Grace Mangano is a poet, writer, and teacher. Her essays and reviews frequently appear in Comment, Plough, and Literary Matters, and her most recent poems have been published in Subtropics, THINK, and Rust & Moth, among other venues. Mary Grace is an associate editor at New Verse Review. She received a 2025 Individual Artist Finalist award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and lives in New Jersey.

Aldo Nove is a poet, novelist and playwright. He began writing novels and short stories, and later he dedicated himself to poetry. His fourth collection of poetry, Addio mio Novecento (2014) was awarded the Cesare Pavese Prize. His latest poetry collections are Poemetti della sera (2020) and Sonetti del giorno di quarzo (2022), both with Einaudi. He lives and works in Milan.

Seiji Hakui is a Japanese poet based in Tokyo. His poems and translations have appeared in The Road Not Taken, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asahi Shimbun, and elsewhere. He is the author of two books of formal verse published in Japan.

Ryosuke Yabuuchi is a Japanese tanka poet and math teacher based in Kyoto. He is the author of two tanka collections, Weathering of the Heart (2024) and The Sea Snake and the Coral (2018). Since 2020, he has served as a judge for the Kadokawa Tanka Prize, of which he was the winner himself in 2012.

Its face, like a word I can’t remember,

twirls with the breeze,

dust that’s gathered in the latest house

we’ve built—

impatiently

I sweep the tiles laid on the green

we used to breathe

before we all moved in.

Its face is the breeze

which blew away the colours

of trees and grass, of plants and flowers—

and I remember nothing

but its dark eyes of fruit which rolled

from the plain and skies when the vine

was snapped in the wind and rain

and ripped and blown from our stone domain.

And I remember nothing except that there’s a word

which was once free but has now been interred.

Note: Malta’s diminishing countryside is greedily being devoured by entrepreneurs to build build build.

Maria Grech Ganado (b.1943) was born and lives in Malta. She has won National Book Prizes for four of her eight poetry collections in Maltese or English, has been published in English in the USA, UK, Australia, and Cyprus, as well as in translation in 15 other languages. In 2005, she co-organised an international seminar (RE-VISIONS) with LAF (Literature Across Frontiers) and Inizjamed in Malta. She has been given awards by the State (including the first Poet Laureate award), the University of Malta, and her hometown, Floriana. Maria has three children and three grandchildren.

These ancient mountain slopes are poets, even so,

Escaped now from themselves, contemporaries we know,

These ancient mountain slopes, the winds’ assault by night,

They’ve traveled here from many, many years ago.

Home to the sleepers in the cave they’re full of life

Within the empty alleys of the world they wander to and fro

And they were there, confronting Moses’ heart,

As they were passers-by of weeping Farhad’s woe.

They nourish myths, their poems are ambiguous,

They’re visible, high summits thrust up from below;

They’ve burned within themselves, they’re lost within themselves

Though lost beyond all loss they’re near at hand, and though

Their voices seethe with silence, still

The last word’s always theirs, both now and long ago;

They are the high imaginings of God

These ancient mountain slopes are poets, even so.

Note 1: In both Moslem and Christian tradition, the “sleepers” refers to a group of young men who, in order to escape religious persecution, hid in a cave where they slept for 300 years before waking and emerging from their hiding place.

Note 2: Farhad is a figure in the romance “Khosrow and Shirin,” by the poet Nezami (1141-1209). A mason in love with Shirin, the wife of King Khosrow, he wounds himself with his own tools when he hears the false news that she has died, and commits suicide.

In memory of Aziz and the children of war in Kobane

How hard it was to stay alive

In the war, the bullets’ rain,

When everywhere they looked

Were death and darkness and pain

They had to pack and leave

And travel to who-knows-where

To a geography unknown,

That was anywhere but there

Behind them their lost home

Was black with ash, ahead

A hard uneven road

And the flood of those who fled

His shoulders carried a child

His arms were around another,

Behind them ran a third

Like a mound that dust-clouds smother

Their mother was following them

A mountain of silence and dread,

Eye to eye with the war, tears flowed

Like pomegranate juice, blood-red.

Ah, but the war was brutal

Destroying her hopes with fear,

Stealing her children’s joy

With its thuggish, violent sneer.

Three children-one didn’t smile,

Three children-one had a fever,

They were homeless and silent now

Like a poem unheard forever

By the side of the road, bewildered

By the kindness of the sun,

Perhaps someone would come

And see him there, someone...

War came in the shape of a man,

Death came in the form of the sun

His eyes were fixed on the sky, frozen

Forever, and seeing no one

And then he saw nothing forever,

And forever now he kept

His silence, and closed his infant eyes

On the crimes around him, and slept.

Note: This is the third of three poems dealing with war. Kobane is a mainly Kurdish town in the north of Syria that was besieged by ISIS forces in 2014. The capture of the town and its surrounding villages caused the flight of an estimated 400,000 refugees.

Both translations were originally printed in The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (Penguin, 2021). Reproduced with permission.

Dick Davis is Professor Emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University, His publications include volumes of poetry and verse translation chosen as books of the year by The Sunday Times (UK) 1989; The Daily Telegraph (UK) 1989; The Economist (UK) 2002; The Washington Post 2010, and The Times Literary Supplement (UK) 2013 and 2018.

Khaledeh Forugh is a native of Kabul. She has an MA in Persian Language and Literature from Kabul University and a PhD from the National University of Tajikistan in Doshanbeh. She was a member of the Department of Persian Studies at Kabul University, and has published numerous books of poetry, a novel, and a volume of literary criticism. She left Kabul after the Taliban seized power in 2021 and is currently based in Norway.

Born in Mashhad, Fatemeh Shams left Iran in 2006 and settled in England. Her work and political activism forced her to exile since 2009. After completing her B.A. at the University of Tehran, she studied first at the Agha Khan University in London, and then at Oxford, where she was awarded a PhD in Iranian Studies. She has published two collections of poetry in Persian, and two in English. In 2012, she received the Zhaleh Esfahani poetry award in London for the best young Iranian poet. A selection of her poems translated into English won the Latifeh Yarshater Book Award in 2016. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, and Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among others. She is currently Associate Professor of Modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rend your hearts, and not your garments. (Joel 2:13)

They’ve said so much to one another, yet

he still surprises her with newness, words

leaping from his mouth like seeds from pitted plums

smelling of cyanide and violet,

bearing the sweetness of October days,

announcements of love’s end upon a cross

and of the bitter ash of last year’s palms.

They’ve said so much to one another, yet

they’ve got much more to tell, such as the tales

of how to learn from wounds, from openings,

from secret passages that must be walked

with widened eyes, in order not to lose

one’s way. Today they walked like this through snow,

led by the bitter ash of last year’s palms.

They’ve said so much to one another, yet

the most important journey still remains.

Quite slowly they prepare to leave, although

they know not the day nor the hour. Time is discreet,

master of cheerful mercy: promising

nothing, it makes a subtle English exit,

then seems to say “you see, it didn’t hurt.”

They’ve said so much to one another, yet

there are subjects which they diligently avoid.

They rarely speak of time, that it still hurts,

and that the span from man to Elohim

is not the same as that from God to man

and that the cross is closer still to us

than we are to the cross. They fear blunt nails.

They’ve said so much to one another, yet

they have forgotten more —this is a gift

that pleases them. They are like wayward children

whose parents sign them up for the first grade

and walk with them to school, so they’re not lost

along the many roads, although the parents

died years ago, and now the school is gone.

Originally published as “Środa Popielcowa” in Głosolalia, by PIW, Warsaw, 2025.

Carla Galdo is a poet and essayist from Virginia who has written for Well-Read Mom, First Things, Word on Fire, Humanum, Verily, Modern Age, and others. She earned an MTS from the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, and an MFA in poetry from UST-Houston. She lives in Virginia with her husband and six children. Her website is https://carlagaldo.com/.

Krzysztof Kuczkowski is a prolific Polish poet and essayist, born in Gniezno in 1955. He was the founder and long-time editor-in-chief of the Polish literary journal, Topos. He is the author of several dozen volumes of poetry, including his most recent collection, Głosolalia. He has received numerous literary awards in Poland, as well as prestigious national commendations for contribution to Polish culture and letters, and a biographical film about him and his work, Kładka Krzysztofa Kuczkowskiego, was produced in 2022, and can be accessed online.

A humble little spirit dwells within me.

How does it not feel cramped here? Hard to say.

Hedgehog of twilight, fur of the nocturnal,

it bats its lashes, gilds the break of day.

I sense it in my chest, can’t help but smile—

it’s rummaging for something in my heart.

The tiny paws may scratch a bit. Oh well,

its gift is worth the pain, so let it smart.

It gives me life—pulls in the thick, sweet substance

of food and wine, the moon with streaks of light.

With it inside, even the stomach-turning

sheer nothingness of nothing brings no fright.

Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry, 2022). An award-winning translator and critic, he teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa and is editor-in-chief of Nimrod.

Julia Nemirovskaya is a Russophone poet and prose writer. Born in Moscow in 1962, she immigrated to the United States in 1990 and teaches Russian literature and culture at the University of Oregon. She has published three collections of poems—Moia knizhechka (My Little Book, 1998), Vtoraia knizhechka (Second Little Book, 2014), and Slyshnee (More Audible, 2021)—as well as the novel Lis (2017). English translations of her poems have appeared in Washington Square Review, Exchanges, Asymptote, and other journals.

for Alfred

Facing the stone, a hammer in his hands,

a melancholy man strives to undress

beauty herself, and make those sorrows less

that wound the shining marble where he stands.

Facing the rock, he begins work: a yearning

toward that primeval matter, the first clay;

alchemy—genius grieving—is the way,

the key that guides him to the last returning.

And in this game with room for only two,

in which the endless work that God must do

becomes the shared obsession of all men—

too long a labor for one life alone—

man wrests the angel forth out of the stone,

and captures death in granite once again.

Note: this poem was written for Alfred Moskowitz, the translator’s late husband.

God has another face—I picture it—

not that huge mask of daggers and of thorns;

he must have eyes whose mercy’s infinite,

like the sad child who walks my street some dawns.

God must have skin of deeper hue, I’m sure,

than that dry marigold of livid light;

his hands, I’m certain, have a warmth more pure

than the old man’s who found my door last night.

God must yearn, more than anything, to pass

on foot across all rivers, roam the wild,

and leave that world of stones and of stained glass;

as myriad angels do, God must—God can—

walk on my street, looking like any child,

come to my door and knock, like an old man.

This clock that never shows the precise hour

is like my soul, whose truth cannot be found;

belies, in the uprightness of his tower,

the ring of shade, the wound that girds him round.

This old clock tells the time a life ago,

regards mankind as it regards the rain,

is like Quixote bested by the foe,

wielding his lance—his wooden dream—in vain.

He scans the world—I see him—from on high,

numbers the seconds one by one, as by

his alchemy they’re turned to yesterday...

And although passers-by look up and sneer,

his round eye also marks the passing year

for those who never look, or look away.

César Sánchez Beras is the author of poetic, dramatic, and narrative texts. He has received the Salomé Ureña Annual Poetry Prize [2004, 2019, 2025], the Cristóbal de Llerena Annual Theater Prize [2017, 2024], 2nd Place in the Casa de Teatro International Competition [2019], the Alianza Cibaeña Poetry Prize [2016], the Universidad Central del Este Poetry Prize [2014], the Letras de Ultramar Children’s Literature Prize [2014], the Delia Quezada Annual Children’s Literature Prize [2013], the Aurora Tavárez Belliard Annual Children’s Literature Prize [2004], 1st Place in the National Décima Competition [1993], and 1st Place in the National Décima Competition of the Center for Educational Studies [1991]. He holds a Doctorate in Law from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo and a master’s degree in education from Framingham State College. He is a member of the Dominican Writers’ Union.

Dominican-born Rhina P. Espaillat has published twenty-four full-length books, four chapbooks, and two CDs comprising her own poetry, essays and short stories in both English and her native Spanish, as well as numerous translations, from and into both languages, of work by other authors. Her work appears in numerous journals, anthologies and websites, and has received many national and international awards. Among the authors whose work she has translated are Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as San Juan de la Cruz., Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Miguel Hernández., Federico García Lorca, César Sánchez Beras, Juan Matos, Julia Alvarez, Jose Marmol, and many others from Europe, Latin America, English speaking authors, and the large and active Caribbean diaspora in the United States. Espaillat is a founding member of the Fresh Meadows Poets, the Powow River Poets, the Melopoeia musical trio, and the musical quintet known as The Diminished Prophets, and has earned a great many national and international awards, including the T. S. Eliot and Richard Wilbur Awards, several from the Poetry Society of America, the New England Poetry Club, the Robert Frost Foundation, the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College.

When it comes to skin, time is ever crucial

The moment you begin, go get your hands full

Be sure you have a plan, haste is never gainful

Don't wait for skin to stiffen, stretch it while it's raw

Unfurl it from the middle, spread it in the open

Don't let the trees be veils, lay it beneath the sun

So that no edges crackle, grip it with less tension

Don't wait for skin to shrivel, stretch it while it's raw

Let us keep in mind the warnings I have listed

Keep an eye on time, while the leather stretches

Lizard or buffalo hides, each one has its toughness

Don't wait for skin to dry, stretch it while it's raw

Some are tougher than others, cut them so they vary,

You may be stooped over, tugging till you're weary,

Or sitting back at leisure, pulling without a worry,

Don't wait for skin to wither, stretch it while it's raw

Everything I have said, don't dismiss it, fellows

Or you will know regret, chewing your nails alone

Take command and stretch, that's the secret code

Don't wait for skin to parch, stretch it while it's raw

A lion on the plain, he's not one to be skittish

Beasts are what he craves, a slayer in the bushes

No creature that is tame alarms him in the slightest