By Michael Casey

Featured Art: Bathers 1890/94 by Paul Cézanne

with a singular total probity
he fantasizes about women in our building
the actual social interaction is nil
or rather minimal and centers around coffee lines
the young coffee lady
at the corner stand he calls Casmira
her real name is Dishwava
but he doesn’t like that name
Diswaba the deck he says
and the large-hair customer at the IHS stand
he calls Ingrid
and the willowy customer on the HR floor
he names Karen
you can imagine his surprise when
he found out Karen’s real name is Karen
subconsciously now he thinks
there’s a mind connection
the world yet a more beautiful place
there are single women in our office
attractive and even affable
why don’t you pay some attention to them
I ask he says he read somewhere
how an in-office relationship
is bad very bad
if one is looking for happiness

By Michael Casey

Featured Art: Fruit Piece by Hannah Brown Skeele

about the new guy?
this is the thing
he misappropriates
as in you’ve seen
my banana-label collection
stickers on bananas
I have the original collection
that exists in the office
he saw what I was doing
and he copies it
he has a collection now
and I assure you
it is not as extensive
as egregious
as mine
although I am wondering how
he got so many different Ecuadors
but how can you be civil
with someone essentially a thief
other than that he’s all right

By Rosanna Warren

Featured Art: Augustus Saint Gaudens II (Saint Gaudens and his model) by Anders Zorn

As if you rose out of your coffin—as if
my heart was your coffin—you rose
yesterday in the sapphire faceted light
of syringes, hospital sheets, and toxic Niagara mist
you painted into a glossy forever.
I felt again your weight upon me
that Manhattan night in our quasi-childhood.
You moved lovelessly upon me, almost angry—
anger I almost allowed myself to know—
as we lay on a borrowed floor trying to make
what might be called love. You broke
each spell. The way Proust discovered love
in captured rats squealing as the hat pin probed
their vital organs. I was a slow student, I learned
dumbly, blindly. And graduated
to my own destructions. The white rats scamper
through your landscapes of pill bottles and blood,
chopped trees and massacred Adirondack deer
and I dream of knocking all the books off my shelf
so that in the light breaking from those pages
I might behold, not hold, your broken face.

By Jim Daniels

Featured Art: Winter Scene in Moonlight by Henry Farrer

His father limping
from his stroke,
throwing his lunch pail
into the back of his pickup
like some stubborn, gimpy
shot putter, then driving off
to the job they gave him
after his rehab: steering
a hi-lo through the greasy plant

after Danny died

one day recovering on the porch
he hollered for the ice-cream man
to stop, then bought us all popsicles

after Danny died

because his son—Vietnam—and so, and so.
He had a cough that could maul a lion
but he wouldn’t stop smoking

after Danny died

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire by William Trost Richards

Just because I’m dead now doesn’t mean
I don’t exist any more.
All those eulogies and the obituary
in the corner of the newspaper
made me feel more vibrant than ever.

I’m here in some fashion,
maybe like a gust of wind
that disturbs the upper leaves,
or blows a hat around a corner,
or disperses a little cloud of mayflies over a stream.

What I like best about this
is you realizing you can no longer
get away with the things you used to
when it would be ten o’clock at night
and I wouldn’t know where you were.

I’m all ears, you liked to say
when you couldn’t bother listening.
And now I’m all eyes,
looking in every direction,
with one eye always open just for you.

By Chard deNiord

Featured Art: Afterglow by Jonas Lie

The clouds were curtains that parted onto the show
of sky above the scar of 89.
Oh, the big blue screen of autumn days
and score that featured mainly strings.
                                                                    Oh,
the epic Something, Then Nothing that opened as
a matinee but played into the night
on a single reel inside the room that housed
the machine.
                     I drove with one eye open and the other
closed.
           I couldn’t tell if the things I was seeing—
broken line, blinking light, leaping
deer—were live or frozen frames.
                                                           Were on
the road or in my mind, into which
I’d also driven at a dangerous speed.
I was bearing down in the passing lane inside
the theater of my Chevrolet.
                                                      I was seeing
myself through the lens of a windshield in the opposite
lane.
I could smell the sky with the windows closed.
I could hear her voice from every cloud, “Come home,
my love. Come home.”
                                           I believed there was still a way,
despite my fame as the man who flies, to return
as myself some day and give her the keys.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: The Madame B Album by Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier

We don’t show these family slides much,
in part, because the projector overheats,
but also because we miss my father’s litanies
of the dead and their diseases:
congestive heart failure; cirrhosis; even gangrene—
their ravaged, cancer-eaten, over-stressed organs
recalled in official diagnoses,
each dry account closing
while the next was ratcheted into place,
dad pressing the remote control
as if it were the release button on a bomb sight.

To counterbalance, we kids attend less
to people than to things: the Coleman cooler
intact after twenty-seven years;
the spangled (barely) red felt stockings
in which we still stuff memory cards and batteries;
the untouched Hai Karate cologne; the flight jacket
Mom’s threatened for fifty-five years to toss.
It’s funny, self-deprecatory, even vaguely reassuring
until we get to the chilling reverse family portrait
in which we sat on the same couch
we’re now watching from,
looking forward to ourselves, some new upholstery,
and a smaller dog at our feet. There’s just
enough time for a last inside joke, for recognizing
the hard candy in its dish, pretending to spit out
the piece now diminishing in my mouth,
before the tone is torqued flush with our mortality.

By  Jamie Thomas

Featured Art: Road in Etten by Vincent Van Gogh

What’s your next book going to be called,
Demolition Work Still Sucks But Here I Am Again?
—John (on the job site)

There is no larger truth here
that has found me helping
John and Ken again,
to tear out the master bathroom
of this wealthy couple in Washington Twp.,
except that work, hard labor, has overtaken me again—
no matter how many tricks I’ve used
to throw it off the scent—
and I am not at all happy about it,
and I am not all that used to it, my blood
on the shards of tile and grout
we’re prying from the shower.

But luckily there is this bucket for me
to sit on while we take lunch in silence.
My silence says I’ll be back to my classroom
in a couple more days; theirs says
the next job is tomorrow.
Together they say There is nothing waiting for us
there, on the other side
of a back-spasming day of work
except a paycheck—and the fact
that though we wake to another day
of the same grueling, tired sentence,
wake in fact we do.

By Marcia Haag

Featured Art: Sunset on the Sea by John Frederick Kensett 

The challenges of translating from one language to another are well discussed and lamented. These challenges increase when poetry is involved: not only must the meaning emerge, but the product must sound like something that could count as a poem. When working in a native American language, these problems are, frankly, insuperable, but we are not thereby let off the hook. I am a linguist and scholar of the Choctaw language who comes to translation indirectly.

It is not clear that native Americans composed much poetry. (How would we know? What’s the difference between a war chant and a poem?) One group that, to my reckoning, clearly composed lyrical poetry was the Uto-Aztecans. The southern tribes, the Mixteca, had writing, after all, and we have a bit of the stupendous lyrical literature that was left unburned when the Spanish chose to rid humanity of indigenous cultural artifacts.

By Mark Polizzotti

Featured Art: Flower Clouds by Odilon Redon

Surrealism was an art of serendipity. Its aesthetic and philosophy revolve around such elements as surprise, chance, marvel, and what the French call la trouvaille, the discovery, the treasure happened upon. André Breton argued repeatedly that the point of automatic writing—Surrealism’s first and most celebrated tool— was to provide Surrealism not with an exciting new literary technique but with a method of research, a doorway into unexploited mental processes that were within everyone’s reach. As he rather cheekily put it in the first Manifesto, “Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it.”

The thing about serendipity, of course, is that it implies a fair amount of spontaneity and blind luck. You can’t plan chance occurrences. It’s one thing if you’re sitting at your favorite café table, paper at the ready and pen poised to take flight. It’s quite another if you’re trying to recreate, in another language, someone else’s experience of that flight, and this is where translation and automatic writing begin speaking at cross-purposes. The trick here, in other words, is that we’re dealing with a text composed (supposedly, at least) in a trance-like flow, in which one word or phrase begets the next, begets the next. The first challenge is to make the translation sound as if it was composed in the same way, but there’s more to it than that: there’s also a psychological element. The mental process that might generate a flux of words in French is rarely the same as the process in English.

By Robert Chandler

Featured Art: The Sea by Gustave Courbet

One of the most difficult works I have translated from Russian is Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway. This novel has a huge geographical sweep, taking in not only most of Soviet Central Asia, but also Iran, Afghanistan and parts of European Russia and western Europe. It incorporates a great deal of twentieth-century political and cultural history. It comprises many separate stories, often linked together only tangentially. It is full of unfamiliar real-life detail—Soviet, Muslim, and (most bewilderingly of all) Muslim-with-a-Soviet-veneer-to-make-it-acceptable-to-the-authorities. And there are at least 137 different characters. How could I make all this not only comprehensible to people from another world but also interesting and enjoyable for them? One approach would be to simplify. The publishers of the French translation omitted about half the chapters, leaving out everything that did not relate to the story of the novel’s central family. I have no doubt that this stripped-down version has its merits, but this is not the way I wanted to go myself. The Railway is exuberant and Rabelaisian, full of slogans, spells and curses; Hamid (the author and I are close friends, so I shall refer to him by his first name) is deeply aware of the power of fantasy, of the way words beget words and stories beget stories, of the power of language to create reality. I did not want to sacrifice this exuberance.