Ryan Buynak

in the eyes of senator strangers,
they are help, just.
they are not blue-collar,
but they are not parking lot attendants.

no one wants to hear their stories any more,
omelettes and cigarettes,
maintenance and tv sets,
who has time for romance?

in these United States
along this Gulf of Mexico,
going to Community College,
illegal as can be.

this is the song of the busboy
playing five nights a week
sometimes six, depending
if someone needs a shift covered.

Ryan Buynak

Ryan Buynak is a very good-looking young man who happens to be the future of American poetics.

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Dolors Miquel

Lift up your hearts… lift up your bums!
Lift your bums off those chairs, sons of the Sow!
Lift your bodies off those sofas, you couch potatoes!
And, if you can’t because you’re too stuffed with vitamins,
walk with your sofa stuck to your bum, you siesta Rambos,
like a snail, in a huff, like a snail, carry your house.
Arise from the grave, you multimedia suckers,
leprous consumers of the American dream.
Arise from this cloister, this big cathedral,
enclosed order of the 21st century. Men enclosed.
Eat the mystery of the excrement,
expelled by the materialist intestine
from the belly of the dollar cow.
Lift your bums off spongy lies, sons of the Sow!
Smell the air polluted by your shit.
Wallow like pigs in the great dunghill of life. Wallow in there.

Here we go…

Dolors Miquel

Dolors Miquel, born in Lleida, has published several books of poetry including ‘Trucker’s Haiku’ (1999) and recently ‘The woman who watched the telly’ (2010) and an anthology of medieval Catalan verse, ‘No one to be seen’ (2010). She has won the Gabriel Ferrat and Ciutat de Barcelona Prizes and feels immensely privileged to be a woman writing in a nation that doesn’t exist and in a language that is always being questioned.

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Dolors Miquel
Translated by Peter Bush

I God, the mammal,

look agog at the universe and invisible things

and at the flea on the belly of my dog.

Will she too look at me

with the same spiritual contentment?

And take a chance on the hypothesis

of trismegistic universes?

Suddenly feel an infinite desire for love

and call it God? God, God.

Call it God in a canticle

for the microbes lying still on the flea’s belly

up, down, as far as my hand or even further?

Will the flea feel infinite power

on the belly of my dog?

Think of destroying the forest of long, soft hairs

that autumn plucks and fills my flat with flakes?

Think of nuclear war?

Feel the Westernness of the void of centuries?

Will the flea consult a psychotherapist or psychiatrist

when she intuits she’s beholden to the gaze of another?

Will the flea blame her father and mother for her neurosis?

Or call me Goddess? Or even worse:

call my dog Goddess, or think

she’s the daughter of my dog?

Will she too ask stupid questions like me?

And crucify other fleas?Similar Posts:

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David Hermann

scan the detail for spectators
blind maestro

hear the hoopla
when they zoom

up and down
into and through

desk city
microbe avenue

ashen spheres
and pill shaped acids

dancing
logarithms

here

among your pens
and paper thrives

sophisticated
biosphere

fissioning aficionados
take their microscopic seats

in microscopic opera houses
built in microscopic streets

raise your hand and with a whisper
spin your silly fairy tales

it is with ease that you will please
the crowd beneath your fingernails

David Hermann

David Hermann is a poet, musician, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UCL. You can read some of his creative and academic work at hermannist.com.Similar Posts:

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Pseudomorph

Pseudomorph

David Hermann

Pseudomorph: Some octopi and squid, when threatened, eject ink in a blob about the same size and shape as their bodies, leaving a phantom copy of themselves (a pseudomorph) hanging in the water, as the original makes its escape.Similar Posts:

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Cees Nooteboom

Translated by David Colmer

 It was summer and winter.

The water by the river,

how it rose.

Mist between the hills.

In the valley the expensive villas,

shuttered, white and pink.

Fox and owl

hidden out of sight,

a work day for herons and mice.

And the man who loved women lonely,

not thinking about the birds.

Dew or rain

on the serrated leaves,

the call of a train

from the depths.

How many, he thought,

how many spokes in the wheel

of a single

day.

 Cees Nooteboom (born in 1933) debuted in 1955 with the novel Philip en de anderen (Philip and the Others) and has since written novels, poetry, short stories and travelogues. He has earned numerous awards, including the Aristeion European Prize for Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story, 1991), which marked his international breakthrough. In 2004 he was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize for his entire oeuvre. The jury’s report stated that with regard to its power of expression, scope and originality, Cees Nooteboom’s prose ‘is of the best produced in the Netherlands in the last fifty years’.

 David Colmer translates Dutch literature in a range of genres.  He has twice won the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize, most recently for his translation of Gerritt Achterberg’s “The Poet as a Cow.” His translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s novel The Twin (Archipelago, 2010) was awarded the Dublin IMPAC prize.Similar Posts:

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Pierrot who on cricket’s
legs legs it through thickets—
one leap—
Cassander (old hoodie),
Leander the goody-
shoes creep,

and Harlequin (Domin-
o’s eyes have an omin-
ous look:
the outfit’s so natty
it’s positive that he
’s a crook)

are all thumping guitars an’
pretending they’re Tarzan,
beguiled
in a pile-drive entreaty
of Little Miss Pretty,
this child

whose eyes are a message
denying her undressage
with such
a defense of her fair butt
as says “You may stare, but
don’t touch!”

Ye planets whose motion
can scupper an ocean
of ships!!
She grants them a shocking
wee glimpse of her stocking,
and skips

away to My previous
could tell you I’m devious
as cats.
And the rosebud in hair-do
inciting her ne’er-do-
well prats.

Paul Verlaine, translation by John R.G. TurnerSimilar Posts:

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only those within yourself.

I couldn’t tell where the city ended

and the people began,

there were only individuals

with crowd-like tendencies

and eternal hopefuls

dreaming of big fat redundancies.

I went through every street in the city

and couldn’t find one person whom I remotely liked.

The revolving doors of human happiness

were jammed shut with people

pushing in every direction

apart from the right one.

To escape the city, I took to the country

… only to find that the city had got there first,

flanked on all sides by ivory tower blocks.

I felt like driving my fist into an oncoming truck

or smashing up a train,

or injecting raw words straight into a vein.

I switch on the TV – which tells me,

apparently,

everything is

drifting towards a state of perfection

but never quite getting there.

Modern living is getting faster

and there are more twists in it than novelty pasta.

We prefer a little truth and a little lie

to a bigger, more factual picture

and life and death

take on different aspects

depending upon

which side of the street they’re viewed from.

Inscribe the child with the tribe

or welcome to evolution MTV style.

And all the while

the cure for a lack of love remains

a long time coming.

We need another inept leader,

kerb-crawler or crank caller,

like a fish needs a trawler.

We have nothing to fear but soaring prices,

global warming, mass unemployment,

economic collapse and government by the

Liberal Democrats

– and fear itself.

We are eating a starter in the

This-Wasn’t-in-the-Brochure Diner.

A Fawlty Towers style waiter

will bring the main course later.

 In 2008 Paul was poet for the London borough of Brent and he performed at the new Wembley Stadium. He has two poems in the new Penguin A-Z of children’s poetry. ‘Don’t try this at home’ is taken from his new collection Catching the Cascade. (www.paul-lyalls.com)Similar Posts:

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Barren, sun-baked and glistening
from rough weather, rocky crags with deep
gnawn-away gorges and warped landings
hanging plant growth
and rubble as the base of cliffs
descend as far as the sea.
The sea! An eagle
at odds with blackbirds and finches,
a debauchery of countenances
and murmurs fading beneath the arch of the sky,
a mass of indigo gleaming
in the filtered sunlight,
a terminus.
On the outcrop
a free wind intoxicates the senses.

From Edward Hopper by Ernest Farrés, translated from the Catalan by Lawrence Venuti (Carcanet, 2010). Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press (www.carcanet.co.uk).

Apology: Litro’s April edition omitted full attribution of the poetry by Ernest Farrés and cover image. Both were reproduced with kind permission from the new collection of Farrés’ poetry ‘Edward Hopper’, published by Carcanet. Full publication information hereSimilar Posts:

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murrai is pondering a profound study on
ignorance but does not want to devote himself to writing it
until he acquires greater general unknowledge
yes yes the paper towels for
after

(From Stories of Rock-and-Roll, 1985)

Antón R Reixa (born 1957) is one of the most radical innovators in Galician poetry. Since the 1980s he has been experimenting with multimedia poetry and artists books. He is associated with the Galician poets known as ‘Rompente’ (‘white breakers’), and was also lead singer and lyricist in Os Resentidos, the first band to sing entirely in Galician.
This poem was translated by Alan Floyd, a lecturer at the University of Coruña.
Both poems will appear later this year in Breogán’s Lighthouse: An Anthology of Galician Literature, edited by Antonio R. de Toro Santos (Francis Boutle, 2010).Similar Posts:

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