Mark Pajak
Inside this disused tool-shed in Hammer Wood
slatted walls morse daylight on an earth floor.

Here two local boys find a knife, its blade
freckled in rust. The older boy picks it up,

with its egg whiff of wet metal, and points
to his friend to back against the wall for a trick.

Then the younger boy's T-shirt is hustled
over his head and rolled into a blindfold.

In its blackness, he imagines the moment held
like a knife above his friend's head. His friend

who whispers. Don't. Move. And then
there's a kiss. Lips quickly snipping against his.

Silence. He's aware of his chest, the negative
of his T-shirt. He pulls his blindfold. Looks

the older boy full in his up-close face. And sees
that he's bleeding, everywhere, under his skin.
from the book SLIDE / Jonathan Cape
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Color cover image of the anthology, Women's Voices from Kurdistan
"On Female Kurdish Poets in Translation"

"Women’s Voices from Kurdistan conveys variety in perspective, experience, and representation of Kurdish women....It doesn’t just present Kurds and Kurdish women as a monolith but rather offers a breadth of voices and experiences ranging in theme. There are poems of loss and of love, of questions and wisdom, of vulnerability and empowerment, of ancestral memory, familial longing, and joy."

via UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POETRY CENTER
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Cover of Asymptote, April 2022
What Sparks Poetry:
Cindy Juyoung Ok on Kim Hyesoon's "After All the Birds Have Gone"

"Stanzas and whole poems refuse the unit of the sentence, creating new syntax and refusing to designate themselves relevant to the constructs of past, present, or future. Kim’s is a poetry of present aftermath—of the annihilation absolute but not completed, of the past yet also ongoing. Although the source text of 'After All the Birds Have Gone' is in the present tense, its frame of reference is of survival, invoking the past, while the implied conditional hints at the future." 
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