Gyo Takano/Japan

fledglings

below the precipice sprawls despair, and at the precarity of peering in 

they hold the mournful meaning, send a glance, the corpse’s froth meanly menacing

a directly descending beak, overbearing

into the bottomless darkness, it cut across my field of vision

dragged forth by the hair, my disappointment becomes known

both legs thrust out, the electronic sound rings endlessly

if i start walking, the compass of my self-restraint runs wild

you, listening to the treble tones of birds at the harbor

Turfalko/Morocco

Indomitable silences

Indomitable

silences

dream

embossed

consciousness

ascending

close

to the adobe temple

NIJO Cenka/Japan

Inome

There’s a boar 

trapped in my left chest.

Its eyes shine through the slits between my ribs, 

and sometimes it tramples my diaphragm 

with its hard hooves.

I’d love to let it run free, 

but if it charges out blindly and hurts someone...

that’s the last thing I want.

So I keep it here, caged but still breathing.

Annie Tilby/UK

Let’s talk Tapestry

 

But

don’t expect anything too literal –

neither restoration nor reconstruction

I use vocabulary to maintain a link.

I want to play –

to evoke not describe,

nor illustrate

Megumi Watanabe/Japan

Quiet

 

A winter shrouded in a years‐long gap of jet‐black heaviness

On slightly withered evergreens and

On completely bare deciduous trees

A light snow falls equally

A light snow melts

Like the purity of the dripping droplets

A trace of weariness resided in an earnest face

There was a time of reconciliation

Ahn Sang-hak/Republic of Korea

That Person Came Back but I Was Not There 

I should have waited for that person then.

As a roe deer glances back when it crosses a hill,

just for a moment I should have stood and waited there,

if it were night I should have waited for dawn.

if it were winter, I should have waited for spring.

Like a bear waiting for a salmon.

Sin Hyeon-rim/Republic of Korea

A Man Who Forgot how to Love

Not earning tomorrow‘s rice, the price of rice rose like bubbles.

News of suicide bombers piled up like tax bills.

Not knowing the laundry shop, people stricken by poverty who committed suicide easily disappeared.

With so much forgetting, we forget history, forget how to kiss,

forget how to love, become workholics.

A man who forgot how to love passed by a woman who had forgotten sex.

Song Kyung-dong/Republic of Korea

Answering Trivial Questions

One day when I was twenty-eight years old

a man calling himself a Marxist came to ask me to join a new organization.

Near the end of the meeting, after some talking, he asked:

By the way, from which university did you graduate, comrade Song?

Smiling,I answered, high school was the end of my education.

I graduated from juvenile detention and have been a labourer ever since.

Son Cecilia/Republic of Korea

Red Ivy

A woman from the nineteenth floor who flew through the air and shattered,

is crawling up the outer wall of the apartment to meet her four-year old son.

She feels she has nearly arrived but it’s still just one and a half floors.

Everywhere she places her palms the crimson trace is vivid.

Two years ago, immediately after the incident,

they packed up and left at midnight.

I wonder if she knows that or not.

Park So-ran/Republic of Korea

Oh, Guitar

On a trash-collecting handcart lies a wornout acoustic guitar.

This was someone’s song, in those days, words hovering nearest to a heart.

No matter what, the wheels roll on.

With every rattle, moans ooze out, hitting offbeat with no score.

A song is not salvation, not eternity.

A song is not a song, is nothing.