The Sign as You Exit the Artist’s Colony Says “The Real World”Aliki Barnstone

Quiet is not silence. Silence is absolute like never and forever. Quiet invites attention to cicadas, the warbling vireo on the wire, the cardinal’s whistle as it wings its brightness over the horizon of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then disappears amid the crape myrtles’ baroque blossoms.It almost speaks to me. / Then as Horizons step, I take a photograph of artists chatting on the gravel path that opens to the studio barn silos.The rabbit lets me come close—It waits upon the lawn / It shows the furthest tree—before it leaps into tall grasses, shelter for fireflies.The limestone statue of the cherubic naked boy smiles down at butterflies and bees feeding on zinnia pollen. Good are those who plant flowers to save our pollinators.Yet I mourn. The air conditioning kicks in. I examine the light on the drainage bed of small stone—a narrow beach outside my glass door—and listen to the distance, the highway sounds rising and falling like wind in spring.A quality of loss / Affecting our content, Emily Dickinson wrote.Before bed, sitting beneath the gazebo’s white dome where there’s cell reception, I talk to my love. We’re interrupted by the long train passing by. Is it nostalgia to love the sound of trains? Is it forward-thinking looking back?A fascist is president: infection in the sentence breeds. We can’t help talking about him.The comedian says people can’t think when they’re afraid. Satire makes them laugh, forget their fear, so they can think, a little newer for the term / upon enchanted ground.Every day more evil against the Earth, the hate cult shouting epithets, hoarding their guns. As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.When the artists gather for meals, they ask “How was your day?” which means, “Did you travel in your studio?” which translates into resistance beyond the borders of this quiet estate.

News

Yahya Frederickson

Before breakfast, we drive into town   to buy a Star Tribune for my father,   who usually rides along, but today sleeps late.   From the passenger seat, you stuff  my mouth with a saucer peach. For energy,  you say, my fog before food well-known.   The beige flesh tastes like jasmine.   Honey. A Persian fairy tale.   In his La-Z-Boy near the big window,   my father will read a section, nod off,  wake, read another, all afternoon.   You and I no longer bother—every day   the same: people killing, being killed.   Instead, we cook, clean. We look   after my father, keep our kids busy.  At the One-Stop, I take a copy  off the dwindling stack, set my father’s exact   change into the cashier’s tattooed hand—   my daily deadline met. Heading home,   you spot it first, uphill, in a birch,  glowing, a blue pilot light. A flaming   blue arrow shooting toward us. I can’t   stop, can’t swerve, it strikes our windshield.   I see it in the rearview mirror glance   onto the shoulder. Maybe it’s still alive,  you pray. Maybe we can put it in a box   until it’s well. So I reverse, hope it flies away.   Could I mercy-kill it under a wheel?  Standing by, we watch a wing flail once,   an eye shut, the end. Even a little death  sucks out our air. Where it hit gravel,   one feather sticks up. Such color!   Lapis-and-turquoise filigree.   We kick a shallow grave with our heels,   and deliver my father the news.

Enter Terror

Dalia Taha

translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel There is no gift we can unwrap without you.  You are what we need   to make out the trees,   spot an opponent,  or take a stroll through someone’s heart.  Without you, no one would read the same sentence   a second time, breathless,  before setting the book aside  to pace from one room to the next.  And without you, there would be no lines to draw  under striking lines in the books of poetry and philosophy   that now rest serenely by your bed,  after having moved universes;   after changing worlds.  Without you, no one would look anyone else in the eye;   hands would not meet.  No one would photograph the waves that plow into fences,   the snow-capped mountain peaks,  the smiles of children.  Without you, love stories would suffer a deficiency,   and without you  people would not gather on pitch black nights;   they would not light candles or invent lullabies.  Without you, no one would ever know   that stories told in whispers  are the only way to contend with night.   They would have tried swords,  grenades, soaring fences, and surveillance cameras—all this nonsense.  Without you, libraries would not stop us   dead in our tracks,  nor would a flower.   Rocks would be dull.  And without you, massacre victims would not remain alive   to stare us in the eyes.  O terror, without you, poetry would steer us towards nothing.   Without you, we could not fathom the abyss that surrounds us: the universe.  We would never be moved   by its menacing beauty.  O terror: You are the singer’s voice   that travels clearly across the borders   in the Golan Heights.  You are the prisoner; strapped, and mighty   in the morning.  You are the beloved’s name  lighting up, suddenly, the screen in our hand.  There is no gift  we can unwrap without you.