Marit MacArthur

Six Poems by Edward Pasewicz (b. 1971)

Come Chat 

I know why I regard your foot,

it holds up your body, and your body holds me up.

 

Since something is wrong with my body,

dead “but” it rocks itself

in a wicker cage and falls into a trance

and whispers: prickly pear, thorns of roses, death

Nine Poems by Marta Podgórnik (b. 1979)

Ovulation Blues

Nothing for it these days but Lipton tea with

chapbooks by Bohdan Zadura or practicing elocution

in front of the brown mirror.

 

At the bus stop, blowing your nose straight into

the trash, holding one nostril,

and in the Czech manner mixing up the bus numbers,

Two Poems by Marcin Sendecki (b. 1967)

[Jump]

Night yelps Day burns

Maybe later

Some kind of later whence

Under a heavy eyelid

 

On a bone-chilled beach

A delicious afternoon

Ready for the road

The wave waits

Matching Różewicz

In one of his famous poems Tadeusz Różewicz writes about his “homework” — it is the “creation of poetry after Auschwitz.” The poem dates from the 1970s and it is deeply ironic, very much like most of Różewicz’s greatest poems. And just like many other of his monumental statements, the “creation of poetry after Auschwitz” keeps coming up in simpleminded interpretations as a handy emblem of all of Rożewicz’s oeuvre. Apparently, that’s the way it’s going to be. But Różewicz’s true greatness is far from handy — it is ambiguous, aporetic, full of doubt, even doubtful.

Three Poems by Adam Wiedemann (b. 1967)

Mineral Water[1]
for Tadeusz Różewicz

sand

clay

gravel

 

variegated clay

 

sand

gravel

 

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