Feeling Sonnet 22
Eugene Ostashevsky
Berlin is green. It is made up of old growth and new growth.

A fire took place here, a conflagration.

It’s called conflagration because it started with flags.

A flag is a mark. If there’s a mark, there’s a market.

I come from the market, make dinner, and engage in struggle.

It is a struggle to get my daughters to sleep. They sleep on bunk beds.

The bunk beds are contemporary. They come from Ikea.

They were transported by trucks. My daughters are transported.

There is a herd of unicorns on the rug below them. They come from
developing markets.

In markets that are already developed, philosophers say that unicorns do
not exist.

There’s only one step from the remarkable to the marketable, and the unicorns
have taken it.

So say the people of developing markets. But the philosophers do not hear them.

A marketing campaign at the airport says this city is Done with walls.

A ring of barbed wire around the airport ensures safety.
from the book THE FEELING SONNETS / New York Review Books
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"Berlin is Green" and "Done with Walls" are both English-language slogans from Berlin municipal advertising. I have been based in Berlin since 2013 but I still cannot experience the city without reference to its twentieth-century history. This poem was written before my older daughter became a teenager and demanded her own room. 
Black-and-white-headshot of Will Alexander, poet
"Will Alexander's Epics of the Surreal"

"There is, in these poems, little difference between the realm of history and the realm of the imagination. Alexander knows only one mode of transport. He is, per Weinberger, 'an ecstatic surrealist on imaginal hyperdrive.' Despite the hermetic design of Alexander's surrealist epics, their reputation has grown steadily in recent decades."

via THE NATION
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Cover of the issue of New Humanist in which Brian Henry's translation appears
What Sparks Poetry:
 Brian Henry on Tomaž Šalamun's "Sutra"

"Though Šalamun would leave the interview format behind, he continued to ask many questions in his work, sometimes building poems upon a series of questions, as in the poem featured here. Although the title, 'Sutra,' implies the imparting of wisdom or knowledge, Šalamun was more interested in the interplay between the questions and answers than in satisfying the expectations of a conventional sutra."
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