Álvaro Lasso (translated from the Spanish by Kelsi Vanada)
When it comes to decapitations I just have to say one thing:
it’s tough to learn to perfect a smile for the executioner.
from the journal
Gulf Coast
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In the newest series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write.
- November 20, 2019
Ladan Osman
My mother walked Liido Beach every morning when pregnant.
I know the mineral scent of saltwater wherever I am.
If the sun bakes the metal of earth, if my own damp scalp sweats,
if I hold my hennaed palms to my face.
- November 19, 2019
Susan Laughter Meyers
What falls from the sky is not always rain
or any kind of weather. Call it precipitous.
I'm fooling myself, of course. Wearing sorrow
is nothing like skin shedding water.
It's more like the weight of a cloak of crows.
- November 18, 2019
Aracelis Girmay
But to be perfectly clear,
my enemies are not hungry.
They are not standing in lines
for food, or stretching rations,
or waiting at the airports
to claim the pieces
of the bodies of their dead.
My enemies ride jets to parties.
- November 17, 2019
Chad Abushanab
There are things you can't learn over the phone,
like how each day your mother's losing weight.
Her hug has turned to a burlap sack of bones.
You imagine it sharp and cold. Her heart beats
jaggedly. There's dark beneath her eyes.
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