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.

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.

Returning to that Country

by Fraser Sutherland I am afraid to return to that small green country of hills and hollows. No one’s there of whom to be afraid. What would await: the ashes of my son buried near the bones of my brother, though neither can harm or hurt me except the brackets of their living and their […]