• No Bread Crust and other Poems

    The Devil doesn’t let go of us it fights for our souls until the very end. In the final hours of my father’s life an invisible battle was taking place. The White Angel was pulling one arm, and the Dark Angel, the other one, while the three of us were trying to change his wet shirt. PROCESS: No diagnosis Like in a multi-level video game like looking for a hidden treasure with a secret map like you’ve entered Kafka’s Process just one more hallway just one more door just one more counter just one mor

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  • MY EUROPEAN POEM

    This poem should be written in English. This poem should be written in German. This poem should be written in French, In Swedish, in Spanish, in my adorable Norwegian, Maybe in Finnish, Danish and Dutch. Baltic languages should decide for themselves. No Belarusian version for the poem, No Russian version for the poem, No Ukrainian version for the poem. The rest are at your choice. This poem should be written in the languages Of human rights organizations,

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  • UN OISEAU EXTRAORDINAIRE

    Elle avance toute seule dans les ruelles d’Istamboul en songeant au festival de Woodstock. Il entre dans une mosquée pour prier avec ferveur. Elle se repose sur un banc dans la place Taksim en se souvenant des manifestations propalestiniennes auxquelles elle a participé aux États-Unis. Il pose son regard sur le ciel en espérant y voir un oiseau,

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  • plaines successions

    LS VIRENT les murs de la géographie s'ouvrir pas comme le tissu colossal qui tombe soudainement et découvre et aveugle les mains et aveugle les odeurs des cheveux mais comme la plainte hachée des conjonctions urbaines interstices de sol et d'immeubles qui s'étendent s'amputent, des voies se fendent provoquent des trébuchements dans les fissures du vent freinent les successions de plaines liquéfiées torrentielles heurtent comme étourdit avoir perdu

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  • Poem

    Opportunities I never had Gifts never polished Materials unavailable A country that’s blocked People who are closed Friends that are shallow Schools that never taught Competitions I never wanted Words that set back Was it really fair Are we equal Pain and suffering you never lived Days I lost without light Tears shed every second Was it really fair are we equal

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  • Poems

    I am still the same boy who pretends to cover his ears in the face of the fireworks That were thrown under his feet by his loved ones and friends And he had to laugh in their faces After they exploded in the air next to him If my life were Less lead and fires I would not think of a picture of an explosive belt Except for the way you turn your bra to your waist to take it off

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  • Drift

    ou didn’t say anything but he took it as a promise, he took it as if you’d sailed so far from the shore that you couldn’t see the way back. Your life will be there where you want to own everything, you give names even to the plants, and the names feel awkward like pets’ dresses. There will be kids as well, they will cry, in them, there’s still too much of the sea, rockeries of the self haven’t emerged yet out of them, they are like water’s mirror, when leaning above them anybody can see their

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  • Who is like God?

    She’s vaster than the Creator, she has a body. Mary is struck by the unsettling feeling that she is the very likeness of herself, and a feathery nothing is making a nest for the newly arrived. And as I stroll towards her in thought, Mary appears, with Mary, hand in hand. Countless voices trimming her horizon; her sight stretches into the distance. Until in an unguarded moment, which might be best compared to pain, she tears the heavens down.

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  • Poems

    You are about four or five and your father seats you on a burning stove. Naked, before the bath. You excuse his forgetfulness with your fright and explain his insults and punches on account of your cries of pain. You do not know what hurts more. And you might think, maybe forever, that the man you love the mo

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  • Le voleur de robes

    Elle était toujours accompagnée d'un vieil homme silencieux à la peau maladive, au regard bleu méfiant, et aux cheveux blancs courts. On disait que c’était un investisseur qui cherchait où placer de l'argent. Les associations d'assureurs et d'armateurs, les producteurs de betteraves et les distillateurs, le syndicat des enseignants et la société des architectes, la mairie, tous déposaient à la réception de l'hôtel d

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  • I will crush you with tenderness and Two steps

    They traveled in silence. In Tefia's Agricultural and Penal Colony the silence was full of ghosts. Barracks-like buildings enclosied a rectangular courtyard. For twelve years, from 1954 under Franco’s law regarding vagrants and bandits, between eighty and one hundred homosexuals were detained there, sentenced for their sexual orientation. They had performed hard physical labour,

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  • POISSON D’AVRIL

    Dans cet extrait du roman de Mounira Abi Zeid Quand j’étais Dostoïevski qui n’a pas encore été publié, Le Libanais Saber de retour dans son pays natal confie ses malheurs à Lucie qui l’entend raconter son chagrin d’amour à Dubaï. -Je vais t’écouter ! Vas-y, parle ! dit Lucie. -Mon histoire d’amour a commencé au début du mois d’Avril quand une jeune employée Anglaise était entrée dans mon bureau à Dubaï.

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  • POEMS

    The lamps in my grandparents' house are unharmed, they look like in childhood. They grandparents are no more. I have fir cones from high school, bracelets from my teenage years, the hat I crocheted for my first cat. I have a broken vase, received from my oldest friend. I keep an empty bottle of perfume in the window. I have dried flowers, shards, old scarves, ugly drawings. Objects help. They make seem as if there is continuity.

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  • Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery

    Yet The Butterfly Cemetery is not an anthology of poetic prose or short stories, a novel, or even— at least not entirely—a book-length essay. It is a basketful of images and recollections whose final section details the genesis of the author's poetry. Mancinelli’s words possess a sober, courageous intimacy which avoids the risk of spiraling in on itself and which, inste

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  • Last Words of a Filipina Sex Worker in Dubai

    Dear Akira, In three days, I’ll be executed. I’ll leave my suitcase for you at the main office––a green suitcase! I hope that you will take possession of what I left inside it. You’ll find some things that might be useful to you and others–and perhaps these letters. You can have the radio that we both bought from the Dubai Mall.

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  • Deux contes POUTINE - APPUIE-SUR-LE-BOUTON

    Il faut dire que Putler avait appris sa leçon, celle qui l’avait laissé hors du Paradis, c’est pourquoi il dit : « J’ai crevé, comme tous les mortels, et maintenant je suis venu voir comment vont les affaires ici-bas. Et bien sûr, tandis que j’étais en haut, sur la terre, je n’ai accompli que de bonnes actions, je n’ai pas procédé à l’expansion des frontières, je n’ai pas renforcé l’état russe, je n’ai envoyé personne à la mort parce que je savais que tout

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  • Anti-hallucinogène/La Cicatrice

    -Il est l’homme qui m’a appris à pleurer. En fait, c’est à cause de lui que je me suis habituée à sangloter dès qu’il se met à pleuvoir. J’imite le ciel. Les nuages gris deviennent le reflet de mon âme émue. Les larmes coulent sur mes joues, alors que les gouttelettes d’eau tombent sur le sol. Cette simultanéité m’étonne, me trouble et me charme. Et je pense à lui.

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  • La revanche d’un élève

    Ce sont très exactement les mots que l’Abbé Corby dit à son élève, Charles, qui n’était pas intelligent et devint dix ans plus tard Roi des Francs et des Lombards, Empereur d’Occident. Charles se rappelait bien la leçon de l’abbé et un jour, ayant bu à la bouteille du pouvoir toxique, il ordonna qu’on lui amenât son maître, et quand ce dernier fut devant lui, mains et pieds liés et bâillonné, Charles lui demanda : « Estimes-tu toujours que je suis incapable de penser et de ressentir ?

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  • Petits pas

    Bonjour, mon amour, tu me conduis comme toujours J'ai souffert, j'ai commencé une course, Je tombe comme une miette dans du beurre. Je n'ai pas pu dormir pendant six jours, mais tu me conduis, mon amour, les moussons sont déjà en rupture, je te vois, mon amour... Je suis devenue un tournesol à mon tour, et je trouve le soleil toujours ... *** La vie a son propre point de vue... On peut essayer maintenant

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  • from Decarceration

    Crepuscular cupules in pulpy vigils. The joy of letting the harrow level out the soil of your being. * the inebriation of running yourself dry belonging when you find the way out in others. * Led back, drawn off once again towards your fluvial and insular solitude which you struggle to gather into a single pronoun. * You’re no longer your body you go beyond yourself like a law whose revocation you have demanded. * Core in which breaks out a fire that again takes on flesh.

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  • LA PLUME AILÉE

    Je parcours la route sans amis, le poids de la solitude de l’au-delà pèse comme une orange lourde sur mes épaules. Mon amie a disparu, son visage se décompose, ses mots s’évaporent, elle ne m’accompagne plus. Je flotte en me demandant si j’ai réellement existé. Le vent emporte un tableau ancien qui représente mon corps. Mes lèvres bougent à peine répétant les mêmes mots que je n’ai pas encore oubliés,

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  • Mon propre visage, pas celui d'autrui!

    Rishabh Keswani, le meilleur attaquant de RNA, était prêt à prendre le pénalty pour les champions en titre. Rishabh avait déjà marqué plus de buts que tous les autres dans le tournoi. « Allez, Rishabh! » Allez, Rishabh! Rishabh a ébouriffé sa coiffure normalement élégante et peignée, maintenant ruinée par la sueur, et a couru jusqu’à la balle.

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  • Teodora Lalova: Too much of a good thing is a bad thing

    Since I moved abroad, home has stopped being tied to a location, to a tight and simple definition. To be fair, I am not sure if it ever was like that for me, even simply by virtue of having family history in several parts of my native Bulgaria. At the moment, home feels like the place/moment where I love and am loved, where I can be vulnerable, where I can do what I enjoy doing and what I find purpose in (both professionally and personally).

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  • “A beauty not yet visible to our eyes”: A Dialogue with Franca Mancinelli

    The Butterfly Cemetery is a composite book, which collects more than ten years of writing. It is an unexpected book, which took shape all of a sudden, thanks to this long time period. The same thing happened to me as a child when I would play with butterflies: I would make a tomb of white stones for one butterfly, then another tomb. . . and suddenly I realized that I had put together a small cemetery. It is a special book because it was born first in English.

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  • POEMES

    black banners at sunrise black banners at sunset black on black are our days and nights black cars and black-clad men with dark machine guns riding on the back of black tanks and pickups firing aimlessly into the darkened sky as if in a bleak wedding driving on roads lined with rotting corpses singing a capella like a good choir stroking cats and taking selfies black phantoms emerging from the dead of the night

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  • Le Corps Invisible

    Elle a disparu, elle n’est plus là. Je me demande si j’ai été l’unique témoin d’un miracle diabolique qui m’a permis de vivre l’expérience la plus sensuelle de ma vie. Incapable de trouver une explication à ce phénomène bizarre, je me hâte de revenir chez moi, je m’esseule dans ma chambre, je rêve.

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  • A poem of Belarus

    And as an old soldier, Like an ex-warrior in the plains, the mountains and the marches, I have the right, after the war has left me to breathe without a reason for more other years. I have the right, To choose those snowy hills to lie down under them with an mysterious safety and happiness. Actually, things were not that worse, Life in my homeland was a joyful journey, sometimes, And a hard one in others.

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  • Intro

    As a little saint floats in the unholy land of the people with the pretended past, demons are too scared to walk this path... but to saint it’s home sweet home - Magic and witchcraft despair is here to last and its judgment day everyday to those who can’t last - An innocent girl indeed but pure is too naïve you can’t win a demon race if you don’t sell your soul away - But not to be mistaken my friend those people are hidden

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  • PANGOLIN STEW

    Anne, 43: «Personal hygiene is something fundamental in the man I am looking for. In addition, if you are classless or your look is very simple, don’t make me waste my time, please». Did you say ‘time’, Anita? But time is the only thing we have left now, girl. If you want to find that fashionable and spotless man you are looking for you need to adapt to the new circumstances, darling.

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  • DES RIRES AU BORD DE L’ABIME

    Je suis à la fois croyant, athée, agnostique, nul et superbe. Je suis le père des bâtards à mille racines, l’amant d’une Aphrodite cosmique dont le talent charme les habitants des continents multiples, le fils d’une mère au corps luxurieux qui s’étend de la mer jusqu’au sommet des Monts enneigés. Je forge mon destin à ma guise, je transgresse toutes les limites. J’existe, donc je résiste.

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