Category Archives: poem

“Haven’t They Discovered My Absence Yet?” by Yordan Efftimov

He fell asleep on the air mattress
and woke up in the open sea.

How many missed calls fill the phone buried in the sand?
Or is there no signal in this wild gulf, so hard to find?
Will the sunset come soon enough?
Sunburn in the open sea hurts worse
than inhaling after laughter.

Haven’t they discovered my absence yet?

A friend insists that
the castaway has already been saved.
Terrible is the fate of the wandering sailor.

-Yordan Efftimov,
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger:
Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry

Yordan Efftimov was born on January 23rd, 1971 in Razgrad. He holds a Ph.D. in Bulgarian literature from St. Kliment Ohridski University. He teaches theory of literature in New Bulgarian University in Sofia. Yordan has worked as an editor and columnist, and has hosted radio and television literary programs. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Heart is Not a Creator (2013), along with five monographs and two textbooks on modern and ancient literature. He lives and works in Sofia.

“The Metaphor of Dancing” by Jim Lally

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comes to me on the cusp of spring
when peepers do a raucous prance,
their delicate rust and tiny throats
sending out an aural sex signal
that drives away tortoise-shell calico.

A friend stops to listen at the pond
and, in the din, describes the dance
lessons he’s taken up:
Waltz, Tango, the Schottische.
Every Thursday, he drives to town,
attending special classes for people
with two left feet. It seems the vow
he made a dozen years ago
to dance with his wife through
their shared life was more
than some imaginative metaphor,
for his wife is a writer
whose imagination has her
literally dancing through life.

My friend tells me that after
next week’s lesson, he’ll return
to teach me to dance with the peepers.

–Jim Lally,
Stick Tight Man
Accents Publishing

Jim Lally is a Kentucky poet known for his curly white beard and straggly ponytail. He is a member of the Poets’ Supper, Poezia, and Holler writers’ groups as well as the founding member of Writers at Artcroft. He graduated with a degree in English from Brescia College where he was the editor of the school’s first literary magazine. Jim has been the Spoken Word artist at the Walk for the Arts in Berea for the last two years. He is a partner with his wife, Jennifer Gleason, in the organic farm business of Sunflower Sundries. His poetry ranges from the irregularly scattered to the tangle of the stranglehold.

“Clearing” by Nikolay Boykov

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when the moon is only a moon
and the man next to me only a man
I want to write a poem
of when the moon is only a moon
and the man only a man
with words which are only words
and on the notepad’s page: a flattened moth

–Nikolay Boykov,
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger:
Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
(Accents Publishing)

Nikolay Boykov was born on January 26th, 1968 in Vidin. He holds a degree in Hungarian philology from Lajos Kossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary. Nikolay has served as an instructor of Hungarian language and literature at St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia. He is the author of three books of poetry and two books of prose, most recently The Book of Life (2010). Additionally, he has translated several Hungarian authors into Bulgarian, including The Union Jack by Imre Kertész.

“floodlit sky…” by Barry George

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floodlit sky –
the wrecking ball swings
in and out of darkness

–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 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.

“Pastorale” by J. Kates

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This is poison: David
fingers something budding
in my backyard. Kneeling
in the mud,

David says, otter. He
shows me where the beaver
dragged a poplar sapling
to the river,

where the elderberry
topped on a clean bevel
shows the mark of browsing
at the level

of last season’s snowfall,
finds the high-bush
blueberries in the naked
underbrush —

he in the cool evening
for a moment rightful
owner of my garden,
I a spiteful

creature in his footsteps,
naming all the animals
in their habits, birds
by their calls.

The northwest wind drums yesterday’s blizzard
into a victory dance, four feet thick
over the budding crocus and daffodils.

We scatter all our store of sunflower seeds
and popcorn for the puzzled birds. Split wood
lies like Shiloh’s dead under the blossoms.

This Eastertide, it is winter resurrected
to preach the annual triumphant sermon
on the impermanence of burial.

Good Friday finds us shoveling out the cars
in perfect sunshine, the day as long as ever,
white as a lily everywhere we look.

A hiss of hail on the new grass,
stones the size of my whitened
fingernail flail the daffodils
into confetti for half an hour,
as if you had said, I’m leaving,

and afterwards, ice dissolving
in the furrows, around the fisted
fiddleheads, and pursed tulips
nodding in their slashed foliage
as if you had said, I didn’t mean it.

I have washed my hands of winter in the spring dirt,
grubbing for granite, first fruit of the garden
every year. The pallor has rubbed off on my shirt,
leaving my fingers rich and dry and brown.

My arms have taken to the spade like a swimmer
lapping out the first long rows where the seed
will lie like beads brimming in the wake of summer,
tangling upward clean as the sickle’s blade.

My legs rock on the slow heave of the year,
learning to balance once again to the roll
of shifting earth, to the light wind off the river,
to the rhythm of dip and swell, of dip and swell.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

J. 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).

“Before Turning Off the Light” by E.C. Belli

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They pretend not to see each other
undress

in the hazy light of the nightbulb.
He’s seen her act

a thousand times before,
and yet

there’s something fascinating
about the sadness,

the way
this next part unfolds:

she folds
his shirt, pouring into it

a memory of them, a hair,
has to stop,

set a hand
on the chest

of drawers, turn
to look at him

and reset herself.
Slavonic Dances

stir the air,
step-parents to the part

inside
she has forgotten

for now.
There is no doubt—

it is his mother
standing in the frothy light.

–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.

“Time is a Neutron Bomb” by Georgi Gospodinov

267 Replies

Nothing will be knocked down,
the houses will stay,
the streets will stay,
the cherry tree in the yard will stay.
Only we won’t be here.
That was the lesson
about the neutron bomb.

I’ve known since then,
death is a cherry,
ripening without me.

–Georgi Gospodinov,
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger:
Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
(Accents Publishing)

Georgi Gospodinov was born on January 7th, 1968 in Yambol. He holds a Ph.D. in literary history from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He is a poet, writer and playwright, and one of the most translated Bulgarian authors since 1989. Georgi has published four poetry books that have received national literary awards, among them the National Debut Award and the Best Book of the Year Prize. His poetry has appeared in many international anthologies, and his book Natural Novel has been translated into over 20 languages. He has authored screenplays, as well, including the short feature Omelette, which received honorable mention at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. Georgi is an editor of the respected literary gazette Literaturen Vestnik. He lives and works in Sofia.

“To the Grocery List” by Barbara Sabol

“Miscellaneous Merchandise” by Staci Schoenfeld

17 Replies

a found poem

Two prom dresses.
One long,
one short.
Must see.

–Staci R. Schoenfeld,
Bigger than They Appear:
Anthology of Very Short Poems

Staci R. Schoenfeld is an MFA candidate in poetry at Southern Illinois University. Her poems have been published in Appalachian Heritage, Still, and other fine journals.

“Cherry Wood (The Making of Birds)” by Matthew Haughton

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for my Brother

His wife chose
a cherry wood
box to hold
him,
like a poem
holds a stray
bird.
Balanced as
a feather,
the making
of a bird
is difficult –
given a handful
of Springs.
The throat
opens,
the bones
hollow,
I still hear
the voice
of his wing.

–Matthew Haughton,
Bee-coursing Box
Accents Publishing

Matthew 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.

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