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Eeuwenhout
(Een droom)
Is het valsheid in geschrifte wanneer ik
uit vannacht noteer dat waar de paarden
graasden het gras weerbarstig was?
Streelde daar bij Eeuwenhout hun manen,
kende niet hun namen maar ze roken naar
de weergalm van gebeden uit een oude tijd.
Vervolgens stak ik langs diens linkerzijde
traag een heel lang mes het hart in van een
stille, vreemde man. Amper zat er bloed
aan toen ik het terugtrok. Hoe merkwaardig.
Je zou denken dat het er van druipen zou.
Wat smaakte even later toch het bier me goed.
Bert Bevers
Eeuwenhout (Een droom)
Verschenen in het Droomnummer van Gierik & NVT, Antwerpen, 2017
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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The Norwegian mother
She walks thinly along the narrow road
back to the school, as I walk towards her.
We stop and talk. She tells me that her
Illness has spread to her head. Her hand
radars around her face grimly.
What can you do? You carry on as you do
when you have three young children
who need your care. My family in Norway
are no help, nor is my husband’s here.
He has given up work to care for the kids.
Who cares for you? I ask.
Have you a good community around you?
The women of the mosque come round
with food every day.
They feed my husband and the family.
You carry on and don’t think about the future.
She looks at her watch. I apologise for taking up
her time. There is a recorder concert, she grins,
and presses ears in pretence of pain as she walks on.
Vincent Berquez
Poem: The Norwegian mother
Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet
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Winner of the 2022 Publish Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award. Finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.
A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty).
The poems in Ari Banias’s thrilling and discursive second collection, A Symmetry, unsettle the myth of a benevolently ordered reality. Through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, Banias contends with the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory in the architectures of daily experience.
Refusing the nostalgias of classicism and the trap of authenticity, these poems turn instead to a Greece of garbage strikes and throwaway tourist pleasures, where bad gender means bad grammar, and a California coast where mansions offer themselves to be crushed under your thumb.
A piece of citrus hurled into one poem’s apartment window rolls downhill and escapes the narrative altogether in another. Farmers destroy their own olive trees, strangers mesmerize us as they fold sheets into perfect corners, “artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they “leave politics out of it.’” Climate collapse and debt accelerate, and desire transforms itself in the ruins.
From within psychic interiors and iconic sites—the museum, the strip mall, the discotheque, the sea—A Symmetry attends to the intimate, social proportions of our material world and discerns the simmering potential of a present that “can be some other way. And is.”
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poetry, and the Nation, among other publications. He lives in Oakland, California.
Ari Banias:
A Symmetry
Poems
October 2021
Publishers: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 978-0-393-86813-5
112 pages
Hardcover
$26.95
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The art of divisibility
She wants my time
but not in rows of measures
or in the control of mathematics
but in the hidden measurements
of being together, of feeling
without addition or subtraction.
Having someone’s space in time
is all that can be truly given freely.
When we adjust so time does,
as we shift to the warmth of company,
which is what can be said
for these moments of value
to be understood as precious.
We control time and divide it into two,
an equal share for both of us, as we
become living geometry and curve
around each other’s cogent and form.
Vincent Berquez
Poem: The art of divisibility
Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet
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Mijn broertje vliegt
Voor mijn broer Peter
Ik kijk hoe onze vader af probeert te
drukken als mijn broertje door de lucht
beweegt. Kun je denken dat je vliegt
wanneer je amper weet dat je bestaat?
Niet zo heel ver weg van ons wieken
kraanvogels over deze lente heen. Licht
lijkt wel rood en motor mama tolt onder je
maar rond en rond zodat de lens bijna niet
weet hoe scherp te stellen. Daar blijf je dan
hangen op het ogenblik dat jij dat verre later
lijkt te weten. Je kijkt. Ik sta erbij en kijk
ernaar. Hoe hoog mijn broertje zweeft,
hoe blauw zijn broekje is. Hoe jong we zijn
besef ik al en ook hoe verder we nog mogen.
Hoe we leven in kamers zonder wolken.
Hoe rekbaar als de tijd wij schijnen.
Verschenen in de herinneringenspecial van
het tijdschrift G., Antwerpen, 2018
Gedicht: Bert Bevers
Illustratie: Peter Bevers
220922
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Shards of colours
I paint the world in the wet,
in colours mixed with liquid light,
and like tears of love, reality emerges
and seals itself therein.
The dormant awakes everywhere,
in my silence, in my journey,
and like the joy of happiness,
truth emerges and beauty stands.
An empty space in the universe
offers itself up to the feast before it.
Colours as miracles, drops of God’s
love for the immensity before us all.
I wash my hands after the day’s work,
the colours trickle from my fingers
like fish with sacred wings, I am given
these tiny shards of shimmering miracles,
and then when I wake the following day,
to my surprise, I find small traces remain
to remind me to rejoice in them again.
Vincent Berquez
Poem: Shards of colours
Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet
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Heterdaad
Avondgrauwen glijdt over omfloerste bekentenissen
van lijdzame biechtelingen. Op de zolders hunner
zielen zullen spijt noch verwijten verstoffen. Er
klinken vermaningen aan de bedeesde teugels
van de nacht maar er zal, hoe traag ook kousen op
worden getrokken, tegen ochtend geen verweer zijn.
Bert Bevers
Heterdaad
uit de bundel in voorbereiding Bedekte termen
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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Always the coolest of doorway
It wasn’t necessarily the best of times
or the best of me, the best of wines
or the best of you, the warmest of nights,
the brightest of moon, the nicest of streets,
the trendiest of bars in the smart part of town.
We didn’t have the cleverest of talks,
sit at the best of tables, with the cleanest of napkins.
My pockets weren’t the fullest, as the moths attested.
I wasn’t at my wealthiest, or my smartest,
or wearing the shiniest shoes with the strongest of laces,
chewing with the whitest of teeth in the kindest of moods.
We certainly weren’t coy about our agenda that night.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t know you or I didn’t want you,
or I wouldn’t try or hadn’t had; I wanted what I wanted
and slowly the alcohol took hold and awoke the desiring,
and you could’ve imagined a better seduction,
as the night could’ve been the dullest ever
without wanting to or trying the making of love to you.
But wasn’t the moon the fullest, and weren’t we the closest,
didn’t we feel the passion and violence of the kissing, the biting,
struggling in a moment of an explosive erotic experience.
Didn’t we search for privacy in the dirty streets that night?
Weren’t we two bellyfuls of red wine in the emptying city,
swaggering and swollen, swaying in a London doorway,
hidden from the pace of hectic pedestrians.
Hadn’t we become the most romantic of couples
in our boozy, breathy pairing, as we locked tight together
and vanished completely in a haze of shaky memories that night.
Vincent Berquez
Always the coolest of doorway
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Photo: VB – The artist and his son
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Schemerlamp
In een ver verleden onder deze schemerlamp
bedacht hij hoe zijn moeder samenspande
met de avondval. Uit radio beneden geluiden
die hij nauwelijks kon duiden. Van alle eeuwenoude
sprookjes in dat bed rook je de oorsprong.
Onder die lampenkap kwam haast vanzelf
een stil geloven. Door het heden schippert hopeloos
versnipperd vroeger, laverend als een oude schuit.
Hier kijk ik aan tegen een wand die alles weigert.
Bert Bevers
Schemerlamp
Eerder verschenen in Eigen terrein, Uitgeverij WEL, Bergen op Zoom, 2013
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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A fascinating blend of poetry and science, Ben-Oni’s poems are precisely crafted, like a surgeon sewing a complicated stitch, moving through the multiverses of family, religion and discovery itself.
The book culminates in an ancient Jewish Idea about “Efes,” which is Modern Hebrew for “zero” but also in mystical texts, means “nullification” and “concealment.”
Ultimately, Efes becomes a process of transformation for the speaker, revealing as well that the closer humanity gets to understanding this mysterious force, it inevitably changes the riddle– and us along with it.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019).
She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal ,Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, North American Review, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, among others.
Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Rosebud Ben-Oni writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She is currently editing a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
If This Is the Age We End Discovery
by Rosebud Ben-Oni
Publisher: Alice James Books (March 9, 2021)
Language: English
Poetry
Paperback: 100 pages
ISBN-10 : 1948579154
ISBN-13 : 978-1948579155
$14.89
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