Ghazal of the Flesh
“God, or a cell clot rooting in her walls: so I became this flesh.”
Poetry
We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.
at the border
“your legs may want to forget the name of this place, forget / how you rolled into it and swallowed its rain.”
Ode to Rainfall
“Like the skin / I tongued at the throat’s hollow— / that morning salt my favorite flavor.”
Surrender
“In the red brick room, my father cries. / His cries are small, lonely animals. / I carry them with me / like an inheritance.”
Aullo
“Yo vi las mejores mentes de mi generación destrozadas por remesa madness. / Starving. 10 cent. Maruchán. Limón y Valentina slurpin’ paisas”
THERE’S A RATTLE, SOMETIMES
“A strange earth / for this staggered colony of desperate valiant specks. There is / no there, here.”
I’m not one of those who left my land
“And then if not my death then my life will be fashioned like orchids / pouring from the windows, all of my friends catching me in nets.”
September Morning, Mexico City
By Fred Maus
“Rainscrubbed leaves, / the lucid greens of succulents, / trees, vines, shrubs, specked / and caped with every color”
song of our mothers
“each time they wanted to believe the rose had not yet fallen / from their hands only to find it laying on the wet floor waiting for / a man to pick it up again.”