by Jessica Kim

Someone will parcel memories into the cardboard box and leave them on my doorstep. I will not be not home. Today, I no longer live in this body, fingers unhooking from the discolored sky, feet angling towards the heavens, aimless.

by Olena Jennings

Forbidden are the plants that grow around our feet.
Forbidden are the plants that taste like lavender.
Forbidden are the plants that sting with touch.
Forbidden are the plants that fall under our weight.
Forbidden are the plants that point towards the sky.
Forbidden are the plants that can be boiled into tea.

by Snežana Žabić

I will live your futurism
If you will live mine

I see wet cement and imagine
softly imprinting my naked
back in that porridge of silicates and oxides
one vertebra at a time

by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

By noon the sun shimmers the city and I know
I should leave. But I have books to buy and stop
at the only English bookstore. Inside, the air is cooled,
It reminds me of a bookstore at home, in America.

by Olena Stiazhkina
Translated from the Russian by Uilleam Blacker

They did see each other later, after his wife, Varda, had left—and not just in their dreams. Not often, but they saw each other. They would say hello, they would chat. “Here are mine,” she’d say and show him photographs. First in her wallet, later on, her phone. Revazov didn’t show her any photos.

Interviewed by Dmytro Kyyan

‘An enemy of the people’ – this is too strong. Our times were the times of selective repressions, not collective, as it used to be under Stalin. There were certain rules of the game and you knew when you were breaking them.

Reviewed by Clare Needham

“No one loves you anymore,” a Serbian friend tells Tess shortly after the U.S. invades Iraq. “You” refers to all Americans, though Tess doesn’t need to be told. Neither she nor Laura harbor many illusions about their line of work or the lives they lead.

Interviewed by Khrystia Vengryniuk

I am deeply interested in the relationship between what is said and what is not said in the text, in the balance between what is stated and what should be guessed.

by Irina Papancheva
Translated from the Bulgarian by Elitza Kotzeva

It was a lot to take—this very hospital, the terror of the needle inside my arm, all that I have gone through, the removal of the last traces. “Do you have children?” asked the nurse trying to distract me while the other one was inserting the IV into my arm. The wrong question again.

by Ali Podrimja
Translated from the Albanian by Genta Nishku

it’s been days been years been centuries
that the person with the wound in the head
remains on the white hospital table

by Igor Pomerantsev
Translated from the Russian by Frank Williams

You have to be totally devoid of common sense not to believe in mystery. Mystery is there every step we take, literally under our noses. This is something every lathe operator who works with metal, every joiner who works with wood, every sculptor who works with hard, granular and liquid materials knows.

BY JOONY KIM

by Oleg Sentsov
Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella

The morning the aliens attacked us, Jim Harrison was in the bathroom as usual—not because he had an overwhelming physiological need, though Jim himself explained his obscenely long sits on the john as the result of digestive problems.

by Andrea Tompa
Translated from the Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly

Perhaps she’s no longer the same person who has once left. Could she be different at the level of her cells, too? How much time would her mother’s cells need before this could happen to her? And how about the soul? How much time would the soul require?

by Alina Stefanescu

Candlelight makes it look
as if the hand goes numb
before the throat.

You are the color technician
in a dream warning the woman
who was me before bleach.

by Nina Murray

the outside margin of nostalgia
is the last page in a used-up passport
full of exit stamps commingling their inks
a mongrel pedigree
my ghosts reduced to spectral marmosets
winged on my shoulders
I can feel them part the hair at my nape
touch my scalp with their infant-sized
icy fingers
poetry is what I would think if I wore the skin

by Aleksey Porvin

All knowledge of translation is dying in a far-off fire, but we keep trying. “Ask the birch, the river, the explosion that has taken root deep in the heart, beg for the right words, like the children beg for bread from the border guards” – where does such advice lead to? The crumbs smell like brass, the crust smells like lead and steel – everything repeats the structure of the bullet, even this old man with a metal core instead of words.

by Ștefan Manasia
Translated from the Romanian by Clara Burghelea

I took lots of photos, according to personal logic,
but the ectoplasmic entities failed to appear
on the screen. I took pictures of white, red ribbons
hanging from trees but the sudden wind

didn’t make them vibrate, in the Morse alphabet
or another code. It was sunny and cold.

by Justina Dobush

Books have taught me to love everyone, to not allow thoughts of hate or revenge to corrupt my soul. Anyone who reads books knows that revenge is not an option, nor is violence, nor is supremacy of any kind.