The Zero Country
Julian Randall
The wind melodies hard through the cotton
All I need to knowthe dead crave
gerunds with a desperation traditionally
  reserved for rain
in another world I count
among those historical dead
One age stretching past kingdom
crown of silenceI have been mourned
now live again elsewhere here’s what
I have done with itI spit on statues
in front of men who own multiple knives
Men dressed like treestheir children
dream of deer and what it means to own
I make a sad defianceof the escape given
I ride past rows of cotton sun transfigures
them gills of the bleakest fish  O meadow
of child’s fistsO violence that grows into
a more efficient violence I’m some other town’s
ghost storyTheir knives moan my name
whetstonebride of history
All their love is cleaving in any other language
I walk beneath treesbecome the moon’s sharp
whistle Violence is not my only name Yet all the men
I find in foliage look at me and whisperCome trueCome true
from the journal MUZZLE MAGAZINE
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There is a statue in the center of Oxford, MS that reads ‘They gave their lives for a just and holy cause.’ I passed beneath the eyes of that confederate soldier multiple times per week for three years. I spat on it every time, and still do every time I visit. I have lived and passed from many lives, none so sweet or complex as my days in Mississippi.
Color headshot of poet, editor and translator Boris Dralyuk
Boris Dralyuk Reflects on Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

"As part of the reckoning precipitated by the launch of the full-scale invasion, I looked back on the work I had done. It became clear to me that, from the start, I had mostly been drawn to the work of Russian émigré poets. Some of these poets held views or even took actions I find reprehensible. Still, their writing is almost always fearlessly self-interrogative, searingly honest about the contradictory feelings inspired by life in exile." 

via DER STANDARD
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Color image of the cover of the journal Copper Nickel, Fall 2022
What Sparks Poetry:
Layla Benitez-James on Two Poems by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial

"Bea has been described as 'a poet of silence, of everything unsaid which is suggested through language,' and translating these poems opened my eyes to the immense possibilities of brevity, inspiring me to begin a book-length project in small bursts. How Dark My Skin Is Left by Her Shadow taught me the strength of distillation, how intensity rises, and pressure builds when a substance is compressed."
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