Volume 11: the divine

The notion of the divine has often been rendered as something ethereal, otherworldly, emanating from or controlled by a deity. Medieval European women writers like Christine de Pisan and Hildegarde von Bingen, for instance, gained intellectual authority by transcribing their divine “visions,” many of which read like fever dreams to a contemporary audience, yet, in many ways, remain strikingly timeless in their social critique. Moreover, such visions are frequently entangled with the body, utilizing the speaker’s form to engage with divine knowledge, as von Bingen describes, “a human being contains within him or her both the foreknowledge of God and the activity of God.” How might we consider a concept of the divine as not merely the spectral product of religious belief, but rather as part of a more tangible, embodied, and human project? To what extent can the divine be accessed through a worldly or secular sphere?

an excerpt from “iron water”

by Myroslav Laiuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Yuri Tkacz

While he was waiting, Ivan approached a woman with a gold tooth selling mushrooms and asked where she had brought them from. But the old woman grumbled that she wouldn’t say, because her village was always overrun with people like him during mushroom season.

pictures of galina

by Herb Randall

We arrive at the improbably named village of Krushchevaya Nikitovka, once the home of a nobleman by that name, and now of Olga’s parents. She swears the village takes its name from that seventeenth-century boyar and not the Soviet leader of the 1950s.

“Dry Tree” and other poems

by Lauren Davis

Vertebrae bruised by rock,
chest-rib bones
so prominent under skin
that your chest would vibrate with fear
at the surface, nothing to protect
what was underneath

lord of the cherries

by Kathrin Schmidt
Translated from the German by Susan Vickerman

It was in the times when, day in day out, the only thing I cared about, looking back now, was being an Exemplary Child of the German Democratic Republic; the times when our schoolbooks contained a verdict on the previous war, but only as a thing long in the past…

missing

by Anton hur

Gunnie went missing in Chile. It is not the kind of place a young Korean man goes missing in. Jungmin, one of his best friends at university, has been on the phone for three days.

comments on television

by Judita Šalgo
Translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox

My first window on the world, several decades ago, looked out onto a wall, onto bulletin boards with newspapers. Now that I need to say what I see out this window, what’s there? The wall has been demolished; behind it yawns an abyss.

hey pretty girl, time to wake up

by Anna Dzērve

Libations in Saturday's Waters: A Series of Estranged Libations

by Alina Stefanescu

Ancient Sumerians spent their afterlives in eternity eating dust. Generous descendants would pour liquid into their ancestors' graves with clay pipes to unparch their lips, to moisten their mouths. Thus water was added to dirt, making soil: the breath of creation.

Lascaux

by Edwin Fagel
Translated from the Dutch by Claudette Sherlock

You lie tied & blindfolded
& all the men are chanting

sanctus sanctus

they all share the same name
& all walk as I do

Five Poems from “Opera Buffa”

by Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from the Slovenian by Matthew Moore

Elephants are achromatic,
The porters are sore.
Rose land wreathes you.
I see a faery fly into a sand dune.
That wind can sure play
the grasses.
Orality? Who can coin the scythe?