Day of Rock

by Mark Halpern

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 […]

Attaya

The tea ceremony is called Attaya. The first round is strong and bitter, the second sweeter with a hint of mint, and the third round is sweet and minty. It mirrors friendship, which grows over time to reflect how the longer we know each other the sweeter the relationship becomes. What happens most during Attaya, however, is talk. We consume conversation. We talk about the rain, if there is any, the wind, which is more common, and the oppressive sun. And the villagers return to their natural spaces, rest or sleep peacefully. I leave the fire wondering if I had enough materials to tunnel to Mauritania. I just can’t sleep.

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

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Foreign Literary Journal is a compilation of poetry and prose related to the theme of life away from home.

72 Hours in Goa

Good old Goa! Good-as-gold Goa: the golden jewel of the Indian Ocean coast, former Portuguese trading colony, cradle of Full Moon Party hedonism, famed stop on the Hippy Trail from Istanbul to Bangkok in the swinging 60s, and my home for a month the summer after my sophomore year at Dartmouth, where I truly found myself.

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 […]