Languish

By Julia Gardner

Three Poems of Korea

Dear Korea

and your dreamy neon lights,
Nascar cab drivers indifferent to my safety belts,
you’ve always given me a bed,
at times it’s been a park bench,
but if you couldn’t get me home you always woke me up
with sunlight.
Thank you.

Two Poems for Paris

Paris by Carol Alena Aronoff Paris was always more than Paris: the light of Monet’s garden illuminating Renoir’s picnic, the playgrounds of Matisse, Lautrec. Art drunk with croissants every morning on lace-covered tables with forsythia blooms in cerulean, the aroma of burnt sienna- cups brimming with water lilies, pure ambrosia soft like ripe brie. The […]

Howie Good

Somehow we were always expecting something like this, a strange wind off the Atlantic, moaning and cursing and full of old hurts, tearing shingles from roofs and slamming birds against windows, threatening to fling us, too, into another country

Learning to Speak

Learning a new language at fifty
is like learning ballet at seventy.
I love the music of new words
the dance of new thoughts,
a drumbeat of names:
Pevek and Anadyr, Roytan and Wrangel,
Larisa, Volodya, Valya and Slava,
Pyotr, Victor, Ludi, Villi, Yuri.
I want to come back to the north
and talk with you about polar bears,
and the ice floes, about icebreakers,
and the long night,
and the flowers on the tundra,
about where you came from
and where you are going,
and if the arctic will still be white
when our children have children.