Poetry inspired by Injustice (1941), a mural by Maxo Vanka at St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Millvale, Pennsylvania. Editor's Note: The contents of this poem include graphic reference to domestic violence and sexual assault. Photo courtesy of Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka. Photo credit: Rob Long/Clear ...

Illustration by Izumi Miyazaki The eighty-year-old priest Mario waited alone for Marcus in the Windmill Church. It was the second month that the city had been shut down because of COVID, and all the churches were closed. Mario sighed loudly and looked out the window at Wigwam Street. Neither this ...

Living in the Promise of the Future I was a futurist, imagining utopian life ahead. Now here I am, I’m halfway dead. I thought scientists would defeat death. Yet here I am, ripping bread with my teeth. In forty years, we won’t need teeth. I’ll be eighty then, close to ...

DIMENSIONS You can’t know for sure When hope really dies Or if it dies last But only feel That it defers its big plans For an undefined future. And because This future itself Is also in the future Your fingers have learned How to sift every scrap of coincidence Then ...

It’s May: no fallen leaves to herd into interrogatives. Still, the wind searches, calling the names of those it’s driven out. The time between gatherings meanders on the year’s grid, a river forced northward, like a graph that shows the country repeating mistakes in two different centuries. Absence takes the ...

Totalitarianism. The night when it is eternalaches like a knife woundfreshly sharpenedthe question is knowing (how) to survivewithout the ritual magic of the dawn. Totalitarismo. La noche cuando es eternaduele como una herida de cuchillorecién afiladola cuestión es aprender a sobrevivirsin el mágico ritual del alba. A single blow. I’m ...

On foreignness, fear, and steel — and how the author experienced exile in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simten Coşar and her dog Dört by the sea. To my father, Ergün Coşar (1934 – 2020) I arrived in Pittsburgh on a cold January evening, after a long sunny ...

This poem was written in response to the killings of unarmed African Americans, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Flowers for the Wretched Lady Libertyyour huddled masses have arrivedand we can’t breathe.Lady LibertyYou need glassesto see that the shackles around your ankleare still strangling us.You need to say ...

This is the second of two segments featuring Brazilian writer Marcia Tiburi. The following excerpt is from her 2015 philosophical treatise How to Talk to Fascists and is Tiburi’s English-language debut. To learn about Tiburi’s story of exile, read her interview with Maya Best. How to Talk to Fascists by ...

Love Letter DEAR MINERVA: I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that the flowers of my feelings blossomed in the spring of your beauty with its powers of birth and its shining radiance in all parts of the globe all at once. Do you remember how we ...

First Story Lili divided the mashed potato into two parts and put each on a plate. Lili wished she had some carrots to put next to the mash. That way Danial would get a little bit of vitamins. There was still some money left from the sale of Danial’s novel, ...

Before the Tiananmen Massacre took place on June 4, 1989, I had been engaged in literary activities at five universities in Beijing. In 1987, I was charged with “disturbing peace of society” and incarcerated in Wang Wu Labor Camp in Guiyang, Guizhou Province. After the Tiananmen incident, I was placed ...

In October 1978 Huang Xiang, Li Jiahua, Fang Jiahua, and Mo Jiangang traveled from Guiyang to the capital for the first time. Arriving on the tenth, they posted the inaugural issue of the underground journal Enlightenment on a wall in downtown Beijing. Huang also recited his long poem “God of ...

The First Intimation A tree appears in February. God knows how many trees there are in the world that look just like it, but for me there is only one. It flashes outside the train window and disappears, hardly catching your attention before it goes out of your sight. There ...

About the Series: These poems are a part of our ongoing series exploring isolation, exile, and “The Everyday Pandemic.” With the arrival of COVID-19 new realities emerged. Isolation became ubiquitous. Everyday movement suddenly came with great risk. The spaces that once brought order and safety became malleable and uncertain. Throughout ...