Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
      say it in pig latin                   that you couldn't feel more guilty                   that marking your path
                      lent something enormous in you                   lent it to translators and children

   fire promises                 promises spreading, smoke                  and to disappear as slowly as it arrived
                      and where fire passes it resembles                it resembles a photograph on fire

        all the notes I wrote                and the sound of the idea of horses                  I left in January
                  when I was vulnerable to fantasy                to someone else's fantasy of January

      you shouldn't be ashamed of yourself                 not now                 you can't grieve everything
                       we slowly learn to distinguish burning                 from a burning sensation

   like actors missing their cues                 we were embarrassed for each other                we thought
               we thought we knew something about the other's sound                  about their ideas

 how a poem lazily lands on the floor                 claiming it meant better                  spreading, smoke
           the "end of the world"                   whatever you mean when you say you have no regrets

   it was probably the translator's fault               too idiomatic                  a too-soft cautionary tale
                       I notice when I look in the mirror                 that you have fire-black hair

I imagine my sitting here                 in my poem                   which is an ugly way of saying I'm alive
              the feeling of a knot of receipts at the bottom of a bag                 my short temper

      I come back to dizziness               as if it were convenient                    dizzy when I come back
                               as if it were convenient                and it had the sound of hooves

    every second that passes                  the seconds get smaller, tentative            and when l look
                                       at myself in the mirror                    I see you getting older

         out of your mouth                  music on the radio, spreading, smoke                  "no regrets"
                               a brief planet, a brief meeting                  this fire never put out
from the journal AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
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"For A Ukrainian Poet, Putin's War Is All Too Familiar"

"At 83, no longer a young poet, Ihor Kalynets knows something of life under Russia's thumb. Having spent nine years in the Soviet Gulag, including hard labor cutting stone, he secretly wrote on cigarette papers what are regarded as some of his best verses. They were crumpled into tiny balls and smuggled out of prison." 

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry:
fahima ife (New Orleans) on Ecopoetry Now

"That I required a desert to write poetry of the swamp. I open another poetry collection, wander inside the wet density of word, step outside world as we know it. As if poets hold access to the mycelial inner-dimensionalities of Earth as we continue singing in its wake. Something about lack of old forest in the DeepSouth—as you say: the woods here are less than one-hundred years old, on a billions of years old planet, in a newly-contested country, written in the lineage of descent."
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