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In Berlin

Phan Nhiên Hạo, translated from the Vietnamese by Hai-Dang Phan

It’s already past midnight
but the sun has never been late.
Waiting at the end of the street
the sun will catch a yellow tram and come
meet us in a café just opening its doors. 

Flamenco Vietnamese Opera

Phan Nhiên Hạo, translated from the Vietnamese by Hai-Dang Phan

Looking at the stone sculpted face I don’t hear a thing
only see a row of perfect teeth
a mixed-media exhibit of nylon and banana leaves. 

A fortune teller recounts all the times he’s faked blindness
foreseeing a century without light.

Notes on Red

Landis Grenville

                                      The orchard was

and the knuckles of a man after boxing, the linen
cast off the bed, a woman holding him in the red

between her legs. Her mouth moving is the measure
of triage. And no one dies of red, though it’s messy.

Longing in the Age of Quantum Mechanics

Lance Larsen

At the Tate she rhapsodized
about the shapes

in Braque so I stepped in to see
what it was she saw

Never mind she said
without your broken shadow

playing across his lines
it’s just another boring cubist nude

 

Lance Larsen is the author of five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa, 2018). His poems have appeared in APR, TLS, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Orion, MQR, New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Paris Review, New Republic, New England Review, and Best American Poetry 2009.

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