Ishion Hutchinson

AmayaBouquet - Judith - fotografia toma directa impresa en papel epson cotton hot press 320 gr - 110 cm x 150 cm - 2014

 

A GIRL AT CHRISTMAS

The choir that cannot die.
Fish and fennel. Snow. Christmas
tree, clover and pomegranate.

For all she’s gladdened: milk
which is love dreaming in one
hand; clefts of clementine stain

the other. They cannot die,
these tribal ornaments, coral
joy, battering ceramic, peach

bones. Scotch bonnet seeds.
She then belts her savage choir
and dances herself into a festival.

*

VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ

Some meager talk of Larkin
over quiche and pâté, olives
the proclaimed ragamuffin
picked at as though our lives;

circumspect, the neutral host
blanched at pills and diaphragm,
shook her clipped head of frost,
insist he please changed from

that cold brute, to where life
is modest, the islands, perhaps,
not this social phalanx;
but he answered, none too vexed:

that’s the drivel of some bitch;
a gulf caved into her face;
the champagne flattened to piss;
cardiac breath, no one flaked,

waiting for blood on the ice,
an extremity, voice rifted
on voice; burred, tender, polite
in one spur, like crisped pomfret

forked in the eye, she said:
all solitude is selfish,
and effective only when dead;
be selfish. You won’t be missed.

*

READING LIGHT YEARS

A soft light, God’s idleness
warms the skin of the lake.
Impeachable, mind-changing
light in the mind of the leaves.
What is terrifying about happiness?
Happiness. The water does not move.
God’s idleness is everywhere.
In the October and November
inlet, the leaves sleep far
from the married corpses,
bound by a pure, inexplicable love.

*

SONG OFF THE ISLAND

I walk the midnight her voice
storm off the island into the house,
the cupboards and closets,
heaving books out of place;
I climb the whitehaired moon
of her tears bolted to furies
pacing in the hanging plants.
On each scream’s scaffold I abide,
an old soldier, full of dreams
to sleep, kneeling to the eye
in the wall, its jagged dark
in the morning braid of her love
pain; there I minister amid
what we tear down and build.

* *

Image: “Judith” (2014) by Amaya Bouquet   

Ishion Hutchinson by Rachel Elisa GriffithsIshion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collection, Far District: Poems (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journal Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. http://ishionhutchinson.com


Published on July 20th of 2014 in BAR(2), Poetry.



[ + bar ]


Dossier Bellatin

The Buenos Aires Review just turned two, and we’re celebrating with champagne and a dossier on one of our favorite writers: Mario Bellatin.

Bellatin is a luminary of contemporary Latin... Read More »


Mar del Plata

Rosario Bléfari translated by Hilary Levinson

We’re standing in the plaza, watching the man who makes ashtrays in just a minute or two. The scent of freshly burned wood.... Read More »


張愛玲

這是真的。

有個村莊的小康之家的女孩子,生得美,有許多人來做媒,但都沒有說成。那年她不過十五六歲吧,是春天的晚上,她立在後門口,手扶著桃樹。她記得她穿的是一件月白的衫子。對門住的年輕人同她見過面,可是從來沒有打過招呼的,他走了過來,離得不遠,站定了,輕輕的說了一聲:“噢,你也在這裡嗎?”她沒有說什麼,他也沒有再說什麼,站了一會,各自走開了。

就這樣就完了。

後來這女子被親眷拐子賣到他鄉外縣去作妾,又幾次三番地被轉賣,經過無數的驚險的風波,老了的時候她還記得從前那一回事,常常說起,在那春天的晚上,在後門口的桃樹下,那年輕人。

於千萬人之中遇見你所遇見的人,於千萬年之中,時間的無涯的荒野裡,沒有早一步,也沒有晚一步,剛巧趕上了,那也沒有別的話可說,惟有輕輕的問一聲:“噢,你也在這裡嗎?”

Read More »

Kenneth Pobo

BERGMAN’S SUMMER WITH MONIKA

At work, she’s a game guys play between loading boxes, her home, cramped, noisy.

She and her lover sail under a high arch into an archipelago,

summer brief, a match blown out. Food gone,... Read More »



» subscribe!

Newsletter