Rethink.

April 1, Wągrowiec, Poland (trans. Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese) Marcin Świetlicki Woken up. At once entangled in the business of the lake. A few hours before dawn. Most probably. And the lake already lives, breathes, sends off the swans to eye him: a shadow in the darkness seeking the path to the human terminal. Awake. At a …

Thanks to Catherine Rogers for her thoughts. In West Virginia (from failbetter.com) Maggie Glover Each morning was a fresh, blue breakdown. I perfected my skills of isolation among those hills, the splash back of creeks and muddied snow drifts. I had enough money, but not enough money. I learned the word “holler” and made friends …

Sonnet: Thoreau in Chernobyl (from Lost Poems) Alison Croggon The woods were beautiful as always, but dry. It seemed a subtle poison at the roots drained them imperceptibly of life. A want, or heightened colour, in each leaf hinted profound disease, as if the rites of generation faltered and withdrew beyond emergencies of flood and …

The Bend (translation Joanie Mackowski, from Poetry Magazine) Claude Esteban Around the bend of a phrase you return, it’s dawn in a book, it’s a garden, one can see everything, the dew, a moth on a leaf and it’s you who rises suddenly amid the pages and the book grows more lovely because it’s you …

Spent (from Poetry Magazine) Rae Armantrout Suffer as in allow. List as in want. Listless as in transcending desire, or not rising to greet it. To list is to lean, dangerously, to one side. Have you forgotten? Spent as in exhausted. Comment: The regression forms a circle. “As in” constitutes our markers, where words are …