Two poems from the current issue

BATTERED

by Maurice Scully

here is the news & weather

pluck a string

wait      repeat      vary

put a plum on a plate

get the brushes out

clear the mind

pare an apple

get stuck in

[if the source be close]

here is the news & weather

a thin slice in time

through a rising population

they call it Intercultural Post-Media Studies

we sing dumb

here is the news & weather

when the sun swells up &

burns off oceans & human

cultures if not long long

gone by then incinerate

& your home planet & histories

& languages & talents

& pitiful bitternesses

vanish with

uncountable myriad

intricately beautiful

microscopic diatom

& poetry of course fizzles

to ash & its ash is swept

forever away

then …

here is the news & weather

 ANCIEN RÉGIME

 by Elisa Audino

Poetry is revolution,

wrote Amiri Baraka,

and the revolutionary is he who curses inequality

from the street.

Rap was revolutionary at the beginning,

Trap for ten seconds, at least the idea,

the Beats for about twenty years,

jazz while it was black.

Italian poetry expresses 

its revolution in the rhyming couplet

or in words like dismal, skull, sepulchral.

The Classics, it says.

Conservation, it means. 

translated by William Wall

from No. 94

KOAT NEWS AT 6

 by Alanna Offield 

As the signal buffers its way from the air-conditioned newsroom
to the edge of the fire, the young reporter nods her head for slightly too long.
Yes, she says, thousands more acres, hundreds more evacuations
the biggest active fire in the country, the biggest in New Mexican history maybe
and I wonder is there something of pride in the recognition. I am listening
for her accent. Decoding if she belongs to these burning mountains
or if she chose them, if when she got the job in Albuquerque,
they told her to tone it down, to remove the music of her words because viewers
wouldn’t understand her, it would remind them too much of the family they left behind
for the city. I wonder did she record herself speaking and play it back until
her sentences stopped curling at the ends like smoke.

CAT SA LEABA

le Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Cat carad, agus mé ar cuairt chuige,
bhuail sí isteach sa seomra
nuair a bhíos chun dul a chodladh
agus ligeas di fanacht in aice liom –
bhí teas agus fionnadh uaim;
ach dúisiodh mé ag a trí a clog,
mar bhí sí ag cíoradh mo ghruaige lena hingne
is ag brú orm, a srón beagnach sáite
isteach im’ chluas. Níor dhein sí crónán ar bith,
lean uirthi ag obair chun rud éigin a chur
i gcuimhne dom, ag obair i ndáiríre
chun go dtuigfinn, ach theip uirthi,
bhí an codladh ró-throm. Ansan thosnaigh sí ag caoineadh
agus bhí orm éirí agus í a scaoileadh amach
faoin oíche, mé cosnochta ar urlár fuar.
Ar maidin,
bhí ionadh orm faoin rud a tharla, ach
cén fáth nár thuigeas pé rud a bhí i gceist?
Nach mar sin a bhíonn an scéal,
an fhilíocht ag breith orainn le greim –
le greim an uafáis, sa dorchadas
is ag imeacht arís gan fiú focal amháin
agus an dualgas fágtha aici romhainn,
an eachtra a thuiscint, conas a tharla
tiomnú cait a bheith chomh deacair san a mhíniú?