Category Archives: poem

“making change…” a Haiku by Barry George

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Wrecking Ball

making change –
the conductor shifts
his toothpick

–Barry George,
Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku
Accents Publishing

Barry George has a new book of tanka haiku called The One That Flies Back. You can find it byclicking here, and you can read Katerina’s interview with Barry about it by clicking here.

Barry GeorgeBarry George’s poetry has been published in journals including The Louisville Review, Controlled Burn, Modern English Tanka, Modern Haiku,Frogpond, and Ko, and in the anthologies A New Resonance 2: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku, The New Haiku,Streetlights: Poetry of Urban Life in Modern English Tanka, Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems, Butterfly Dream, and One Man’s Maple Moon. His haiku have appeared in Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Romanian, Croatian, and French translations. His essay, “Shiki the Tanka Poet,” was published in The Writer’s Chronicle. An AWP Intro Poets Award recipient, he has won numerous international Japanese short-form competitions, including First Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Gerald R. Brady Senryu Contest. He is the author of Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku (Accents Publishing), nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the forthcoming The One That Flies Back My Way(Kattywompus Press). He lives and teaches in Philadelphia.

“With the big bed she understands…” by Ivanka Mogilska

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The Season of Delicate HungerWith the big beds she understands
when love ends.
She wakes up and sees—
a back at the other end of the bed.
That’s why she prefers
for them to sleep in a small bed,
covered only with a sheet.

-Ivanka Mogilska,
translated from Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger:
Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
(Accents Publishing)

Ivanka MogilskaIvanka Mogilska was born on June 5th, 1981 in Plovdiv. She is the author of two books of poetry. Her first, DNA, won the Southern Spring Award for the best debut book. With her second book, a novel entitled Places to Get Lost In, she participated in the convention of European first-time novelists at the International Book Festival in Budapest in 2008. In 2011, she published her latest poetry book, Otherwise Said. Ivanka works as a copywriter and translator. She currently lives and works in Sofia.

“Traipsing” by J. Kates

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We meant to work. New snow
carpeted all the tempting trails
and veiled the wood I’d stacked
against this day. We should
have hefted it to the pick-up
and ridden it back to the house.

But hell. The sun was shining
(as my wife would say, meaning:
it’s obvious) and the woods
were lovely, light as they can be
when all the leaves lie underfoot,
and the truck had busted a front tire.

Here’s to the day, the kids whacking
at hemlocks with a broken beech,
the grown-ups chattering lazily,
the grouse keeping quiet and the deer,
nothing but footprints. And here’s
to hot apple cider and cold beer.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

“She Shifts to Face the Window” by E.C. Belli

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Nobody knows him. Not even she.
Sometimes though, when he can’t understand

the memory shaking her,
when she seems to have escaped a world

wild with ferocity, he thinks he loves her
more than anyone yet. She is pale, easy

to wrinkle, readable as Proust. She is long,
too long to explain. She comes

in volumes. Tomes. She is described
at length, never captured. Tangled veins

show around her nipples. Her neck is a swan’s—
she is part bird, that much he knows.

When he brings her darkness, she falls
asleep. Often, he turns her, halfway

through the night, to face him
and often, when she’s engulfed

in the dream, he cups her hands in his
and promises that together they will go

farther than either ever alone.
Tonight as he mutters again

endless words of expatriation
never to materialize,

he feels a flutter
inside the cage his fingers create,

the brush of feathers against his palms.
Infused for so long

with thoughts of a salutary journey,
she has begun to migrate without him.

–E.C. Belli,
plein jeu
(Accents Publishing)

A Swiss native, E.C. Belli’s poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Gulf Coast, FIELD, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, Caketrain, Mid-American Review and also in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle, PO&SIE and Voix d’Encre (France). Her prose has also appeared in Words Without Borders, BOMBlog and Iris (University of Virginia). She is a recent graduate of the MFA program in Writing and Translation at Columbia University where she was the recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She writes in both French and English.

“A Fly in the Airplane” by Dimiter Kenarov

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The Season of Delicate HungerSo high up for the first time,
where no fly has ever flown,
and where, if it weren’t for you,
nobody would’ve believed

how innocently you crawl
as if on a casement window
with a view of a forbidden garden,
and perhaps you remember

blackberry jam with cream
and other earthly delights
from your short-lived childhood:
blossoming plums, white acacia,

the buzz in the lazy afternoon
over the old man’s casket,
when you could still hear
the echo from your own flight

and were important enough
to be squashed on the table.
Now you move much faster
than ever; in a single season

you cover several continents
and your chaotic trajectories
are straightened up as direct routes
from point A to point B;

the eyes, those multi-faceted
rubies in the head’s treasury,
are polished to the core
like smooth Plexiglas,

out of which the view
remains one and the same:
an endless sky, dotted by clouds,
incomprehensible road webs.

Which one of your ancestors
has imagined a future like this:
a foldable tray stacked
with vacuumed junk food
and you, inconsolable,
gaunt, with your back turned
to all that, take a sip
from your coffee with sugar,

and again you cling with your feet
to your oval window,
which, trust me, will never
fling open for you.

Little insect with a frail proboscis
and useless, crystal wings—
even Jonah hasn’t felt so lonesome
in the belly of the whale,

and if the plane accidentally
dropped in the middle of the ocean,
only your three-lettered body
would not be flown home.

-Dimiter Kenarov,
translated from Bulgarian by the author
The Season of Delicate Hunger
(Accents Publishing)

Dimiter Kenarov was born on January 25th, 1981 in Sofia. He has studied in the United States at Middlebury College and the University of California Berkeley. He works as a freelance journalist, poet, literary critic, translator and writer. He is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Apocryphal Animals (2010), as well as a book of translations of selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop. His work has appeared in various English language magazines and newspapers and has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing. In his free time, Dimiter swims, snowboards and takes pictures of the world.

“Original Ruse” by Barbara Sabol

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i

No apple was worth the risk, not even
an Asian pear apple, the snappish bite
and comely shape, like a sister.
(Besides she had no map to locate Japan,
no dictionary to look up exotic.)

Even a Gala, succulent as a cooltongued
French kiss, was better left
to glow pinkly on that one cordoned-off tree.
(There was that problem of a map, and
no produce catalog.)

Bored by his puny repertoire of stories, small
store of words to describe the world
(always jabbering: birds, look, monkeys, funny,
again? perfect, perfect), she wandered

out past the orchard, to the garden’s reaches,
only seeking quiet, space to consider
the real meaning of perfection.
(Convenient, the lack of a dictionary.)

But he was always after her, a constant
annoyance. You can imagine. She longed to
drink her coffee in peace, an occasional morning.
It didn’t seem like a selfish entreaty.

ii

Past the rows of self-tilling beans, yellow melons fattening
in the heat, the flowers she knew from their odor (naming them
herself – orchid, narcissus, skunk cabbage),
.                                                             she discovered something new:

She knew the genus instinctively: Nightshade, lovely word.
She also fathomed that plants in this family could be toxic.
But that fragrance – perfumed dirt, musky green,
summer-downpour-heat-lightning pungent –
.                                                            irresistible.

And it fell so easily from the vine.

iii

He had followed her there, found her
warming this blood-red globe in her palm.
He watched as she pressed her nose to the stem,
breathed it in with a kind of rapture
he’d never witnessed.

So, after a small bite, just a nick
in the soft skin, after coddling it
against her palate, then grabbing the nearest limb
for balance, she had no choice
but to hand it over.

–Barbara Sabol,
Original Ruse
(Accents Publishing)

Barbara SabolBarbara Sabol’s poetry and prose has appeared in Public-Republic, Blood Lotus, Poets 350, the Tupelo Press Poetry Project,Tributaries, and on the Akron Art Museum’s website. She has an MFA from Spalding University. Barbara is a long-practicing speech therapist, living in northeastern Ohio with her partner and dogs.

“Tracking Seeds” by Matthew Haughton

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i. Tree Latches

The latches come down
the hill,
each falling separate
from the other,
spindled among
the breeze-born.
The life of a latch
is to be seeded
back in the earth,
light as a thumb
slipped half-under
running creek water.
And this is paradise,
this spilling
of seeds downhill.
Under the amber-light,
the calm birthing –
the gust and scatter
where the latches fall.

ii. Whirlybirds

Little pink
fans
spill from
the tree
limbs,
gathering
below,
like tornoff
mosquito
wings,
like motes
passing
windowpanes.

iii. Hitchhikers

Out of branches,
the hitchhikers
sail into the
grass.
Steady as fishhooks,
they remain
stillborn,
waiting
to seed
their sense
of resurrection
off the backs
of passing beasts.

–Matthew Haughton,
Bee-coursing Box
Accents Publishing

Matthew HaughtonMatthew Haughton was born in Colorado in 1977. At an early age, his family returned to eastern Kentucky, where his lineage stretches back over a century in the region. Matthew is a graduate of the University of Kentucky. Most recently, he was a finalist in the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning’s Next Great Writer Competition. His poetry has appeared in literary magazines such as Kentucky Monthly, Still: The Journal, and The Heartland Review. This is his first published collection of poems. He lives and works as an artist and educator in Lexington Kentucky.

“Walking Through a Snow Storm is Like Waiting To Call Yourself” by Dan Nowak

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rp_of_a_bed_frame_cover-194x300.jpgAnd I thought Nebraska couldn’t make me
any whiter, but here I am a new snow angel.

Call me Michael, or Ishmael, or anything you want
until the second date. Then let me become

your snow white knight with post-feminist, post-
humanist chivalry. Our laptops are horrible lap

dancers. I pale in these winter lights, try to blend
in like Bob Ross. With no happy trees, friendly mountains,

or inanimate people to block the snow, how am I to stay
dry? Nebraska makes me hunger for crackers

and cannibalism is only a bad idea if you
are the last one left. I am still waiting on

my echoes from Denver. The Pony Express
feels slow when all the streets are yet to be plowed

–Dan Nowak,
Of a Bed Frame
Accents Publishing

Dan NowakDan Nowak’s first book, Recycle Suburbia, won the 2007 Quercus Review Poetry Series Award. He also has a chapbook, Burning the Arson Dictionary: Poems for Thomas McGrath published by RockSaw Press. Dan is co-founder and co-editor ofImaginary Friend Press and an editor for New Sins Press. Dan lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and enjoys that Lakefront Brewery is less than a mile from his home.