by Daisy Zamora

Senior Special at the Tennessee Grill
translated from Spanish by George Evans                  

Here they make landfall
            like rusty freighters
                        in this cafeteria, eatery,
                                                          ultimate harbor.

Under morgue light
            (fluorescent ceiling tubes)
Czech words, Russian, Polish,
            intersect at the corners of conversations
                        via street names,
                                    landmarks of some city,
                        some village, a town square, a little church,
                                    a house lost in a wheat field.

Who was standing on the dock when the ship sailed,
       how was that girl who grew tired of waiting,
              what happened with the mother, the father, the siblings
                                     left behind so long ago,
                                               ones they hardly remember
                                     till they go back out to the cold streets,                                                      streetcar clattering at a stop,
                                     to retiree apartments,
                                     rooming houses,
                                               rented rooms,
                                                          to the fog
                                     that awaits them one step from death
                                               they don’t know where or when.

Senior Special en el Tennessee Grill

Aquí recalan
            como cargueros sarrosos
                        en esta cafetería, comidería,
                                                             último puerto.

Bajo una luz de morgue
            (los tubos fluorescentes)
se cruzan por las esquinas de las conversaciones
            palabras checas, rusas, polacas,
                        con los nombres de unas calles,
                                    las señas de una ciudad,
                        de una aldea, una plaza, una iglesita,
                                    una casa perdida en un trigal.

Quién estaba en el muelle cuando el barco zarpó,
            cómo era aquella novia que se cansó de esperar,
                        qué pasó con la madre, el padre, los hermanos
                                               que hace tanto dejaron,
                                                           que ya ni se acuerdan
                                               hasta que vuelven al frío de la calle,
                                                           al tranvía que traquetea en la parada,
                                               a sus departamentos de jubilados,
                                               a sus pensiones,
                                                           a sus cuartos alquilados,
                                                                       a la niebla
                                               que a un paso de la muerte los espera
                                                           no saben cuándo ni dónde.

by Kim Addonizio

It’s bad luck to break a cricket
or a baby, bad to open an evil spirit
in the house or refuse a kiss
if it’s offered with a pot of gold.
Better to wear your underpants inside out
on your head, sing at the table,
wet the bed blink years pass
and you stand in a circle passing an apple
from which you can smoke hashish
while your parents sleep
in their bedroom in the next galaxy.
Your fate is written on the stairs
to the rec room and on the doorjamb
where your brothers outgrew you.
You’ve got a magenta rabbit’s foot
on a keychain but no keys yet
to anything, the locks are confusing,
and you may have been misinformed
about rainbows and how to keep lightning
out of the house. Blow out the mirror,
one day it will hate you. Eat a lot
of garlic. When a dog howls,
someone is near. A cat has several lives
and so do you; look, a bird at the window
has eaten your youth but what luck,
all these years later
and you’re still a beginner.

by Megan Grumbling

Entreated with white limbs and gall, he came
late, the next morning, glutton that he is
for irony, false maidens. Choose your form,
I’d called the night before, prone in my warm
desert floor bedroll, wanton for a god,
even, especially, a tricky one,
but go deep. No doubt he’d already schemed
just what I would receive, how I’d drag feet
from sleep unvisited, trying to shrug
his spurn, how naught but stumbling would arouse

the taking: How he’d finally enter me
as twenty inch–long cholla quills, blood–thrust
through my white thigh. I knew him right away,
of course, his smirked perversion, such a rash
and slapstick ravaging. Brought low, I flushed
with chastening, outwitted, more beguiled
than dreamt, and was so taught humility
an eros. Later, when I filled my pouch
with creosote, I slipped one bloodied quill
in, too. Seemed I had been asking for it.

by Megan Grumbling

With broomstick, plumb between the claws’
dark troth of shriveled dregs and trawl

it out of there, thing, thought, and all
that clings to it, spore–blackened, balled

up, jaundiced: Newsprint grown a mass
of nodes, cragged furrows where the cast

ash–blonde has nested, tumored lobes
ingrowing. Couldn’t be your own

mess, could it; swear you’ve never read
these words by such spliced synapses,

have you, this baby Buñuel
crushed crassly close to Freedom Trail,

sick joke to dithering muse — words honed
on well–lit surfaces, your own

homes’ folios, phrases pronounced
out loud. One rough sweep, and you’ve roused

such bedlam cryptos just beneath
those porcelain surfaces you preen

before, and easier to pitch
the stuff, than to be rid of it.