Category:Words
Two Short Stories
Naomi Leites
Five Poems
Ziyi Wu
A Horizon Line
When I close my eyes,
I see a horizon line.
It’s black at the Coney Island beach in New York,
Gray on the plane back to China,
Blood orange in LA,
And gradient pink at Charles River,…
Two Poems from Bucha, Ukraine
Lesyk Panasiu, with introduction by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky on Lesyk Panaisuk’s Poetry
“Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion.
“War will live…
Bucha Spring
Ksenia Rychtycka
This fictionalized short story is dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian artist and designer Liubov (Luba) Panchenko, who endured a month of isolation and starvation in her basement while her hometown of Bucha was under brutal Russian occupation. She survived the occupation, but died on April 30, 2022, when her heart gave out. During the Soviet era, her artwork was censored due to its focus on Ukrainian symbolism and folk culture. She was not allowed to exhibit or publish her work. She was a member of the Ukrainian Sixtiers dissident movement, that advocated for freedom of cultural and creative expression.
Microcosmos and Macrocosmos
Louis C. Stewart
I
Avrom Nichols was frustrated with his scientific results. After years of observations of remote galaxies he felt that he had no handle on the real concepts. It is one thing to observe and correlate data and decidedly…
Sharing the Darkness
Carolyn Forché
I wake with a start at midnight. A nightbird striking the window? A bat in the eaves? Maybe someone in the theater of my sleep gave me a nudge—someone I don’t know in waking life. It is cloudy and warm…
Reflections
Lisa Luckenbach
Feel confident, beautiful and empowered in your new wig, the instructions read.
In the mirror a stranger stares back—weak, powerless. I see her ghostly image. She looks raw, bound, and scared.
I sit in the pretend “barbershop” in our…
Fire and Rust:
a Suite of Poems from Pat Pattison’s Poetry Workshop
Each year Boston College host the Greater Boston Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Festival, inviting undergraduate student poets from area colleges and universities to read their original poetry. This year, Skyler Bugg, a student in Pat Pattison’s Writing Poetry 2 class, represented Berklee College of Music. Here are the three poems she presented. Firebird is written in Blank Verse, Eve is an Italian Sonnet, and Becoming is Free Verse.