When the rose perceived the distance between itself and the earth, it brought forth its thorns. When the rose realized that a single leg couldn’t take it anywhere, that it was voiceless and mostly had no echo, it thought of fragrance. The blooming petals: a navel. The stem: a rope that binds it to the earth’s deep womb. That rose will be born someday in a lover’s hand or between the shores of a book. © Soukaina Habiballah. By arrangement with the...

Your pain Scars my blood With a fire Always smoldering   Your smile Escapes Their chains To light up My body   I sink Into the darkness Of your night To drink it in   Heart in     embers I cross Your night   I would like to hide myself in you   chisel time to the rhythm of your heartbeat cover the rose in the sky with your sheet I would like to sleep in your kiss   not wake up only dream in your night I would like to be...

A drop of sky from Paradise streams A bud from the bonfires on Hell's branches A bundle of black rocks in the heart Grateful gifts for the verses that flow toward the moon A page of the epics where heroes' corpses lie buried& The past that advances shouting Charge! The odes sung by souls entering and leaving to doors opening and doors closing Distant graves approaching Girls never seen twice and beds seen many times Water in the blood, bread in the flesh, vows in the bone A...

At just that moment I was eyemate to a blind one and went among you You must have thought we couldn't see Some of you said you'd show us the house of God, then led us to dwellings you’re still building after centuries We didn't mind Some of you without a second thought told us your diaries and wives were your sacred customs We didn't mind Some of you claimed to speak of love and untied the knots concerning your bodies and tried to pin upon us the flowers that grew...

A long while ago now in those chipped years like a camel’s tail in those dim months like a desert mirage in those unchanging days blurring into each other everyone was brought head first into this world The golden oleaster flowers and the copper grains of sand smelled like an upset stomach Ugly people with no concern for their own souls would lock winter in spring and insult it left and right It was then that crawling water was discovered Everyone’s left eyelid would quiver in...

They usually went out at sunset, as the sun and reflections were losing their power of revelation, so they walked along the meadow more confidently and breathed in the air saturated with floral scents. That year the sunsets were blood-red; each evening the sun died from its wounds and that death, which repeated itself from one evening to the next, was probably the most beautiful sight they had seen in their colorless lives. The grass lawn stretched for miles, only here and there held down...

Burning, the needle that gently scrapes my skin, that doesn’t press very deep, that moves along slowly, that skims my flesh beneath the surface, that injects black ink blood between the two layers. Gaël crouches over my thigh. His left hand stretches and holds the skin. The other draws with the strange machine. Piercing, its sound—it reminds me of the dentist’s drill. Its tiny needle makes me think about the one in the sewing machine where Neny Kely rips open her...

  Then suddenly beech woods, all green behind the dozing eyes a deer leaps across the forest road scents of acid and moss and cheek against bark, sunrain between trunks, I'm home and hear the Baltic Sea crash against big rocks far away and I rest like a fairy or a witch in the sweet smells of the forest floor we can so easily forget what we are who we are that we are, but it takes only a little call to waken the sleepers, as now, in the forest, for LISTEN,...

This is a smart time, I think as I sit and eat a sandwich in the kitchen. Tomorrow is sorted, the hayracks ready, the tools even stowed in the shed, your magnificent culinary creation needs one more hour, (no, bread and ham won’t ruin my appetite, I don’t want to pig myself later). Actually, I could even go for a swim, do a length of the lake, come back tuckered and hungry, hang the towel out to dry, but that wouldn’t be fair on you. What’s that you’ve got...

Förby    We have no dipping moon over a metropolis’s hills. We have no breeze caressing the parchment of an aging poetess that would cause her to say: “It comes from the desert! It comes from the desert!” We have wind against the wall of a wooden house like a throbbing ovation. We have a view from the window onto ruins that will be concealed in a few years by forgotten rowan trees. There is the transition of land into sea, there is the unsettled...

what do you write about? asked the Jordanian poet. about love, I answered. there isn’t anything else, is there. yes, agreed the Jordanian poet, there really isn’t anything else. when he read out his poem in the Arabic language his tears flowed freely. sentimental, I thought. then the same poem was read out in English, it spoke of how his family was killed before his eyes, his brothers, parents, wife, and of how apart from love there isn’t anything else. © Trinn...

Now night comes—brings prayer. It opens the silence’s locks makes the sidereal map appear and we kneel facing that immense space between now and the rim of the beginning when spinal cords are all extended. *** I look down on ships as spreading light enlarges my vision. Other ships far off rise bearing gifts. We are leaning out over the heartbeat of waves on cliffs at the far end of the earth. Over there they collect corals, pearls, call on female deities, strew flowers. Within...

  Wilfredo Inuma is the chief of an indigenous Amazonian community. But above all, he is the guardian of the lavatory. Wilfredo founded the Shipibo community of Bena Gema twelve years ago, together with 150 families fleeing the misery of the jungle. They settled in the outskirts of the city of Pucallpa, capital of the Peruvian region of Ucayali. They wanted schools for their children. And jobs. Wilfredo has worked guarding oil company facilitiess against attacks by locals. He has...

The fat man was interesting. A tourist, of course, who had only come to Qoyllur Rit’i to rubberneck. Zimm had seen him on previous days down on the plain below the ice, walking around the campsites set up most recently on the Sinakara depression. There was no mistaking his shape; Zimm figured he must weigh at least three hundred pounds, which ruled him out as a typical festival pilgrim. Plus, the fat man hadn’t brought altar candles with him up to the still night-darkened ice,...

On the first attempt, the trigger jammed. The prisoner wasn’t afraid, and in fact felt a sort of indifference that seemed, in light of the brutality of the instant, to have been there all along, his whole life, quietly lurking behind each of his experiences as though awaiting the ideal moment to surface. Behind him, the footsteps of the soldier, his executioner, rang out: rapid-fire, ready to finish off the job. Then the cold of the steel touched the back of his head for the second...

At first she stared at the window for a while, as her life paraded past in scenes: her mother’s house in Piura, the silent sun high over Piura’s dusty rooftops, which bristled with aluminum antennas marking the luminously streaked sky. Her mother’s house that smelled of Bolívar soap and rue plants beneath the gold sun that hung in the taut, infinite sky. She missed it all, but she was in Paris and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the harsh truth....

The recording and transcript below make up one example of the oral storytelling traditions of Peru, this one from the Tikuna, the most numerous tribe in the Amazon. The recording is made in the Tikuna language. José Fernando Muratú, narrator. 1Nguxtapax went out hunting; it was his second time going out hunting. When he came back from the hunt the kids were bathing in the ravine. 2“Nguxtapax tütütü ãῧbrikari tütütü,...

So it all boils down to this. A whole morning seeing my face and Paulo’s on the television screen. Ten reporters camped out at the entrance to the building. Three policemen on phone-tap duty, reading the soccer pages in the dining room. They might get in touch at any moment. Waiting is all that’s left for me. I’ve called Lucía to tell her that, obviously, I won’t be doing the program today. She started to cry. This can’t be happening to you, she...

Frail before the squalor             squalor being a feeble answer the everyday self gives its own abjections it surprises me to be in a city whose name like the humidity that clings to its ancient walls or like its tubercular pigeons means nothing to me any more than being inside its plastic image as I sink into La Defense or lose myself in the ardor of its past      oh the purity the freshness of withered things...

Audio courtesy of Literatura Sonora. We look like funerary bundles dug out of our graves. There are ten or twelve people sitting on the room’s floor, in a circle, and in the dark. The healer is at the center. He is smoking a mapacho—tobacco typically found in the forests of Peru—and exhales the smoke above the rim of a bottle filled with a viscous liquid. He takes a sip, and then calls us one by one. I’m afraid. Those who have taken ayahuasca before say the...