Category Archives: Issue No. 2

To a Woman by Ariel Resnikoff

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……………………..after the Yiddish of Reuben Ludwig

..

& when you die

I wont come home to you

..

…………with everyone moaning and groaning

…………over yr death:

..

I wont follow the parade after the hearse

through the streets.

..

I’ll buy a bunch of roses,

don my best holiday suit

& wander from street

to street—

…………between brick buildings

greeting everyone I meet along the way:

..

don’t be shocked—I’ve got to celebrate!

……………………………….can’t you see

it’s the dawn of my life,

I’ve (at least) discovered

whose death

………………………………………..to mourn

& whose life

I deplore.

Therefore,

 …………it is my holiday.

..

& tomorrow morning

when nobody remembers your voice

I’ll lie in a corner

hidden

………….by stubborn lips.

..

I’ll purse my lips.

I’ll sing to yrs.

I’ll sing to mine:

from our dislocation

 

..

 

Ariel Resnikoff is the author of Between Shades (Materialist Press, 2014), and the co-author of Ten Four: Poems, Translations, Variations (OS Press, 2015) with Jerome Rothenberg. He is currently at work on a translation into English of Mikhl Likht’s Yiddish modernist long poem, Processions, in collaboration with Stephen Ross. Ariel is an editor-at-large on Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and curates the “Multilingual Poetics” reading/talk series at Kelly Writers House. Audio and video recordings of his work can be found on his PennSound page at: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Resnikoff.php

not that by Ariel Resnikoff

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tohu ve-

tohu with………..out

..

waiting

“to be”

wandering

infinite

skin

over shade;

..

is finity

finally

the secret

skin of earth?

..

question answers

question

marks erasure

marks

..

structure as erasure

erases

strict skin stretches

between shade.

..

Not this

time

w/ clock

‘s calloused hands—

..

not that

river’s

skin

over this.

..

..

Scattered Aubade by Gillian Prew

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December’s cut, sun-up/
……………….winter’s day-bud.

Snow-bite/
…………….trees an avenue of bones/
…………….their last leaves
……………………..like skin leaving light.

………White,
……………a chain of wings/
………………………..a luminous edge.

Morning-song a ballad of glass.

……………….Silvery,
……………….day breaks

loose and ecstatic –
an open throat of notes/

…………………………………….a ghost.

Choke by Gillian Prew

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The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood.
T.S. Eliot

 ..

the hill-line a long bone hiding the sun-spill/ the river thick with muck-blooms/

swell-bellied, strangled by sewage stems the fish swim this garden of graves/ black

the beasts covered in shadows and reborn in mourning/ their visitors are full of

cancer and cold/ birds gather, unnamed/ unfurling their gifts/

 ..

reading the sky I see a flaming bouquet

 ..

grief glows/ the blood is neon, the berries meat/ light is a fist, a snapshot of ruins/ I

have seen the slurry/ here/ catastrophe/ the rain full –  a globe/ one bird with a name,

ten winter swans/ a boatful of people, their flood a luminous milk/

 ..

water, you have become white in your worry

 ..

a chilled flower/ a lacewing/ all the busy variety/ a busking blackbird/ a cat fixed up

by the mystery of her lives/ love laying down her last corpuscle for the land/ and

where is the new language?

 ..

poetry, it is time for your patterns

 ..

the great melt/ the starvelings/ animals folding species by species/ a cage of hens without sons/ a cow sucked to a bag/ the beasts are singing through holes in their throats/

 ..

Earth – a blue light diminishing, a choir of glass/

 ..

(Note: Final version. I do not accept The Establishment’s version)