BROWSE Columns
✕
o child, all the chances that you have
to cull these smooth, white days
are fouled by the winds. this is a velocity
i cannot stall. already, the golden coins
in the battered bow promise you to other shores.
my wintered mind scissors blindly in the dark.
child, in all the race there is no one else
like you. the fields are thick with flames and tendons.
the three seeping wombs of my dull wives
teem with viscid vermin. there will be no one else like you.
o romans, o romans.
where is our native land?
the soldiers lie demented in the fields,
agony is the torment of their minds. the warm
quilt in which your mother wrapped you lies
tattered at my foot. chilled pain comes
with the failed harvest and my empty hands.
i believe that this is winter.
o war, o whip, o waves.
Alani Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who finds herself increasingly in a nudiustertian mode. Some of her recent poems and translations have appeared in ANMLY, The Antonym, Cagibi, La Piccioletta Barca, carte blanche, The Stillwater Review, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. She is currently working on a series of villanelles, a series of translations of love poetry from Portuguese and Medieval French, and a longer epic collection of earth poems.
