[prose poem]A little genesis, please. It’s the ink, Lord. It feels like you forgot to make the ink make the words. Let it not be my brain gone desiccated as a desert hermit’s throat. Let inspiration flow like incarnation, like respiration, like substantiation. If ink were blood and blood were wine and wine were bloodline, we’d have wine and proses, for which I’d settle, Lord of Schrodinger’s cat and quantum physics, dustbunnies and chocolate. You be the needle, I’ll be the dread. Please, any thread. I’ll be the field, you’ll be the scream in the first line. Send streams, reams, trickles. You be mother, I’ll be styled any school you want to scold me into. What of me is worth your attention? You be father, I’ll be puns. You be vinegar, I’ll be toil. I’ll be cat (herd-able), you’ll be, as usual, bog. I’m willing to slog. You be stars (infinite and sentient), I’ll be type—words in any holy font you want, your wont, sentences in stripes. And with these stripes, I will be healed. I have faith in paper and screen, faith in lines and breaks. May the words of my keyboard and the instruments of my heart be. You be the tongues, I’ll be the stutter. Peace=one poem. Lord=one poem more.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 1.
Devon Miller-Duggan has had poems appear in Rattle, Shenandoah, Margie, The Indiana Review, The Hollins Critic and elsewhere. She’s won an Academy of American Poets Prize, a fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, and an editor’s prize in Margie.
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Aura Christi has published 15 volumes of poetry and 6 novels. Born in 1967 in Chișinău, Republic of Moldova, she now lives in Romania. The poems here derive from her 2016 collection, The God’s Orbit.
Petru Iamandi teaches at the Dunărea de Jos University, Galați, Romania. A prolific translator, with over 100 books between Romanian/English, he translated Mihail Gălățanu’s The Starry Womb with Sorkin (Diálogos, 2014).
Adam J. Sorkin has won numerous translation awards including the Poetry Society (U.K.), Ioan Flora, and Poesis prizes. He recently published Mircea Dinescu’s The Barbarians’ Return, translated with Lidia Vianu (Bloodaxe, 2018).
Alison Stone has published five poetry collections, including Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack.