Quarantine The pain isn’t contagious,I assure you, the pain cannot be transmitted,No nerve twisted in my peer’s bodycauses excruciating touching inside me.The pain is not contagious, the painSingles out more atrocious than the walls,No quarantine isolates so perfectly,It’s trivial what I say – that’s the argument.Lord, how much literature we contain!The feelings – remember? –…
Mu Us Desert, Encountering a Herder Too Old to Have Consciousness Paler than the belly of a dead fishAnd more pallid than salt and alkaliThe desert now is dwelling in his earsIn his eyesIn his sweat pores and hair folliclesAnd in his throat From his aged flesh drained by the sunNo more grease or moisture…
For Two Weeks Now For two weeks nowI don’t sit huddled by the phonefor someone else to keep me away from sadnessI no longer wrap and unpackthe knees in my house dresslike two pieces of rancid butterthe cut hairs are goneand the bruisesI used to give myselfso as not to vomit deformed animals every nightin…
INSANI FATUM When I was bornThere were no angels waiting for me,There were no magicians in the backyard,No relatives present,Not drunk prophets;There was no one to drawBeneficial lines in my birth chartOr whoever reads in the golden placentaUnique plots, unpublished destinations;Ariadne, Virgil, Ovid were absent;Only Sisyphus celebrated my arrival:……………_ At last I will be replaced!…
King Crypto and Laplander Enigel Sad minstrel, much steamierthan good old wine served at the weddingBy the groom’s father given thereWith bags and ribbons, tinsel weaving, Of all most stubborn minstrelA grand old song still tries to sing,Sing of Laplander Enigel,And Crypto, the mushroom-king! You, guest with quest!Your feast, my tongue did burn and sting,I’ll…
Book Title: What Survives Is The SingingAuthor: Shanta AcharyaPublisher: Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd, Devon, 2020Date of Publication: February 2020ISBN #: 978-1912876211Reviewer: Sarah Lawson What Survives Is The Singing (the title is a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s lines “Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times”) sings us many songs about our own…
Rice Pudding in the Praterstrasse We were living between heaven and hell literally,we were slender, nervous, we’d silenceeach other with a silky tenderness,we’d wipe our nightmares,we’d make our beds, our boots,we’d go skating on goddamn ice of life.Sometimes we’d notice reality.Then something would squatin the darkest corner of the houseand would begin to whimper in…
In our continuing efforts to bring international literature to our readers, we are pleased to bring the 11th edition of “Life and Legends,” focused on Romanian poetry, which includes works of significant Romanian poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. This cornucopia of classic and modern Romanian poetry is a generous gift from our guest editor Maria Magdalena Biela, a Romanian writer, translator, and scholar based in Finland.
Inside My Mother’s Ring Smooth like her face, an owl of beginningsit stayed on her finger the last six-month road like rain from a tree, a dream wrestlingas they turned her body over in the washing as if she could mend, the gold to re-moldlike her red face and tears at my wedding worn on…
I don’t remember exactly why she chose to visit me every night because I wasn’t a child anymore. I had not spent my youth wandering about the hill behind my grandmother’s house, looking for watercress, gathering it in a pile nestled inside the folds of my skirt. I didn’t talk back to my elders, and…
by Maria Magdalena Biela Romanian poetry represents an integral part of European literature. However, it is vastly unexplored. Linguistic researchers, translators, readers, and historians have not truly discovered and adequately documented the history of Romanian Literature. Such an amputation of an important part of world literature defeats the universal culture. In the space between the…
Random Acts of Silence My mother has characterized my birthhighly inauspiciousthe lunar antithesis of some anticipatedcataclysmic event. She has bluntly recounted over timemy forthcoming’s secondary naturevoid of fore-thought, reasonpreparation or rhyme. My modest realm distains those systemsenviously circling about my head.My throne extinct of thunderous extrusionsquietly rests in place of known dread. Impacted by her…
