Wellfleet from Properties
by Allen Fisher
Wellfleet *
from Properties
When you’re in the outer limits
and want to get back
you look for landing lines
to help you find out where you are
as you fall over
Reorbit is hard
you want to keep happiness
don’t wear shoes or put your dog on a leash
surf all day then skinny through
forests, dive in freshwater wash off
You go back to your second house
before slow re–entry
give your city team two touch points
now this, now this
before get back demand
*Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is where Francesca Amfitheatrof has one of her four residences. She is the artistic director of watches and jewellery for Louis Vuitton and creative director of Thief and Heist, a drop–driven new jewellery business selling jewellery you can only remove by cutting it off.
Converted into linear meters
by Mikhail Aizenberg
translated by J. Kates
* * *
Converted into linear meters
days that cannot be reconciled.
The people between them negligible,
maybe they should be born again.
It seems that their gray faces
painted on paper with charcoal lines.
And any one of the sheets is marked
in incomprehensible signs.
* * *
Suddenly from a thicket showed
a vengeful god peering like a crow.
He will not return to Euripides.
He sharpens arrows and hones
on us, resentful, a knife of bone.
Italy, 24 August 2016
by Mikhail Aizenberg
translated by J. Kates
When the disturbance settled
the nature of the rock brittle
and when domes came to themselves,
having turned into pigeon shells
how salvation is not guaranteed
for the arched passage over the abyss,
and stones wait for an earthquake
humanized by uneasiness.
* * *
A word on the wind; it will not sprout until
the seed germinates in a long breath.
You say “winter” — and everything is covered in snow.
You say “war” — and you’ve guessed a sure thing.
Don’t speak like this, you’re not a mortician.
Time is the cure. A long-range aim keeps quiet.
But word after word the noose tightens;
all from a large, see, intelligence, from that.
Soon around the corner you’ll notice — winter.
You’ll pull out the bottom drawer — earth.
Today
by Valery Chereshnya
translated by Izabella Mizrachi
Taking out a garbage can
concludes an empty day.
A warm breeze carelessly stirs
clothes hanging outside
as a doctor would stroke the hair of a child:
“Everything will be alright.”
Maybe.
To stop within this crawling life
wherever it finds you,
and take it all in:
a toy on the sand
an old chimney, a bird . . .
On a summer night
to touch the fleeting velvet of the world
just for a moment and let it go.
A word calmly said at teatime
concludes the evening,
warming the shade of this night lamp
(Well, what do you see, our cross-eyed spy?
Two midnight bodies,
and today pours into tomorrow
with a jump of the second hand,
as darkness clings to the windows . . . )
I am mortal, and especially today.