One Poem in Italian by Angela Caputo with English Translation by Bruce Hunter

 

NEL VOLTO DELLA GUERRA 

Dipinge il pittore
l’ombra bruciante del male.
Attaccano tanti cobra
dalle fauci spalancate
un volto senza armatura e pelle.
Nella bocca, negli occhi,
teschi che racchiudono
all’infinito altri teschi.
L’espressione è morta.
Riemerge un’impronta,
innocente, dal deserto del Sahara.
Sullo sfondo, un cielo terso
di speranza o indifferenza.

 

Angela Caputo

IN THE FACE OF WAR

The painter paints
the burning shadow of the evil.
Many cobras attack
with gaping jaws
a face without armor and skin.
In the mouth, in the eyes,
skulls enclosing
infinitely other skulls.
The expression is dead.
An handprint reemerges,
innocently, from the Sahara Desert.
In the background, a clear sky
of hope or indifference.

 

Translated by Bruce Hunter

Angela Caputo was born in Bari in 1985. She graduated with Master Degree cum laude in American, European Languages and Cultures from the University of Bari. Afterwards she pursued a Postgraduate Diploma in Literary Translation of Postcolonial Texts from the University of Pisa. She contributed writing critical essays for the literary reviews “Soglie”, “El Ghibli” as well as for the literary review of compared poetry “Semicerchio”. Since September 2017 she is permanent French teacher. She translated for “El Ghibli” poems of the francophone authors August Bonel and Ernest Pépin. For the publishing house KANAGA, she translated into Italian the poetical text “Le Psaume à deux visages” written by the francophone author Catherine Boudet. She was ranked second (section A – single poems) within the First Edition of the Internation Prize of Poetry, Fiction and Non-Fiction – KANAGA and first (section A - single poems) within the second Edition of the same Prize.

Bruce Hunter is the author of 12 books.  His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in over 100 blogs and journals in India, China, the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Italy. His award-winning novel In the Bear’s House was just reissued and also published in Italy as Nella casa dell’orso.

One Poem by Nikollë Loka

 

I know the Sea is grieving

I know that the sea is grieving
in the middle of a waterlogged winter.
I feel sea fever at the end of December,
and fires that fade without making noise.
I'm afraid—it is getting cold!
I shiver from the wind that blows,
and like the sea,
I don’t feel quite well,
even in the midst of June,
when the entire world refreshes itself in the water
willingly, not violently,
when the waves fade
in the branches of foreign blood,
and the fires burn in the eyes of a cyclops.
I know that the sea is grieving.

 

Nikollë Loka was born in Mirdita on March 25, 1960; graduated as a teacher at "Luigj Gurakuqi" University of Shkodra; master's degree in pedagogy at the University of Tirana, doctorate in history of education at the University of Tirana. Author of ten poetic volumes in Albanian and three poetic volumes in Italian (two of which with co-authors); included in the anthology "La Poesie contemporaine albanaise", "L'Hartmattan" publications, Paris 2024. In addition to Albanian, his poems have been published in Italian, English, French, German, Arabic, Romanian, Swedish and Mecedonian. Winner of several literary awards in the country and abroad. Included in the Lexicon of Albanian writers 1501-2001, editions "Faik Konica", Pristina 2003 and in the Encyclopedia of Italian language poets, "Aletti Editore" Rome 2021.

Five Poems by Rafaella Del Bourgo

 

Lilacs

(for T.R.)

 

I’m not sure how long it’ll take,

but it won’t be pretty,

and I don’t need your help doing it.

Do not feel

you have to wait around

and watch me die.

There is no need to cling.

 

If you fall in love with another man

and hop on that train,

I’ll wave to you from the station.

I’ll watch your face

pressed up against the window,

your features a blur

of distance and speed.

 

I’ll go home and make a margarita,

light a joint,

slide into my hammock,

dream of oysters on the BBQ,

line-dancing music,

and all my beautiful lovers.

I will dream of the past.

 

And, if, when I awake

in late afternoon sun,

I see your grey eyes, curious, staring,

I will take your hand,

and together we can breathe in

lilacs, the pale-purple kind,

so improbably fragrant

though the blossoms last

only a few brief weeks

in spring. 

 

Nightgown, 1960

 

Over the phone,

my mother says, I love you extravagantly.

I stand on my tiptoes, darling girl, and kiss your forehead.

Maybe she is wearing that pale blue pants suit,

the majesty of her still-chestnut hair swept

into a French twist.

Maybe she is studying her slim hands,

manicured every week.

 

My lover Stella is pretending to read a book,

pretending she’s not listening.

I am cleaning engine oil out from

underneath my fingernails.

Mom asks, Is that running water?

Are you doing the dishes?

I say, Mmmmm.

 

She asks as she always does,

Have you met any nice men

in your office?

I want to say, I work in a garage.  With men.

A garage full of men. 

I say, Nobody interesting so far.

I feel, rather than hear, her sigh.

 

She says, Ellen’s nephew lives near you.

Now I sigh.  Ellen’s nephew is 5’ 6”, skinny as a stick.

I’m 5’ 11” and stocky, Mom.

I already know she will say,

Athletic, not stocky, and with

such a pretty face.  And that is a consolation, dear.

A consolation.

Stella mouths, Athletic, and leaves me, once again,

to this conversation.

 

Mom wonders if I got the birthday present she sent.

Wants me to tell her she’s a good mother.

The pink box is on the floor

with its pink tissue paper,

and curled lavender ribbon.

 

Inside, another frilly nightgown,

this year it’s the color of water.

She’s sent one every year

for the decade since I left home.

They reside in my bottom drawer,

each still folded with the card.                                         

                                    

I imagine slipping the silk over my head,

stepping out under the bone-white moon,

into the furious night,

in the company of other shadows.

 

The nightgown’s lovely, I say, and thanks,

but I really don’t need so many.

You never know, she says,

her voice husky with alcohol and hope. 

 

Down Under 

 

When her scent sweetens Tasmanian air,

the black fur bristles on his body,

and his muscles begin to hum.

He follows the odor through night scrub,

through moon-shadow of gum and yellow wattle

past where the cockatoo sleeps,

head tucked under wing.

 

The female devil is young, but when trapped,

fights with shrill coughs and sneezes

as if she were allergic to the stink

of his temper and his needle teeth.

She bites to cut skin, connects, then

cowers against the curved wall of her hollow log.

 

His snapping jaws grip her scruff;

he takes her from behind,

mechanical thrust,

both of them in a trance and growling.

 

When he is finished,

seeds implanted,

she lunges and hisses.

With a wound on his hindquarters,

he snarls a warning,

marks the log, marks the earth,

limps out under wheeling stars.

 

Lahore, Pakistan 

 

Noon.

Even in our room

with a swamp cooler going, it’s stifling.

From our second story window,

I look down at the space between our hotel

and the building across the way,

with its solid shade.

 

The three are sitting on the ground,

leaning against the wall opposite,

feet straight out in front of them.

The man in puffy pants and shirt.

On his lap, an embroidered bag.

 

To his right, a small boy

dressed like the man,

topped off with a cloth cap.

 

To the man’s left, a large brown bear

wearing a wide leather collar.

 

The man opens his bag

and pulls out a canteen.

He drinks.  The boy drinks.

The bear drinks.

Then the man unknots a white bandana

and gives a portion of food to the boy,

a portion to the bear,

and eats some himself.

Last, two guavas each,

which they chew and swallow,

skin and seeds.

 

They all lean their heads back.

Eyes closed, they seem to be dozing.

 

Later, groggy after my own nap,

I return to the window

and the space outside is empty.

The man, the boy, and the bear

have disappeared,

the after-image

evanescent as a dream.

 

For Carl in Lichtenstein

 

Once, when he was doing research in Lichtenstein,

the veranda doors rattled

and Carl opened them to a quartet

of drunken associates:

a Bally shoe heir,

the king’s interior minister,

the representative of 400 shadow companies,

and Carl’s own physician

in a three thousand dollar suit.

 

He barred their entry

but they could see my red nightgown,

undisciplined tumble of hair.

It’s true we slept beside each other

although he never kissed my mouth or touched my body

the way he did with those brief affairs –

the 20 year old boys

he always yearned for.

 

He came back to bed, sighed,

and said maybe this would stop the gossip

for a while.

He told me about

working with a Central American hill tribe.

The villagers were frightened by him -- a giant

with blue eyes and hair so blond and fine

it was almost invisible in certain light --

and they thought he was the devil.

No one would give him information

and he had to abandon the study.

 

I loved that he would confess to me

how he grew to dislike those people

who, when he passed by,

pulled in their babies

and even the piglets

the women routinely nursed

sitting in the sunshine.

 

He reached for a pomegranate in a nearby bowl.

We broke it open and ate the fruit,

the tiny red hearts

both tart and sweet.

Rafaella Del Bourgo’s writing has appeared in many journals including Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, Oberon, Nimrod, and The Bitter Oleander. She has won numerous awards such as the League of Minnesota Poets Prize, the Grandmother Earth Poetry Award, the Paumonak Poetry Award, the Northern Colorado Writers First Prize for Poetry, and the Mudfish Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. She recently won the 2025 Allen Ginsberg Award. 

 

Her first full length poetry collection I Am Not Kissing You was published by Small Poetry Press. Her chapbook Inexplicable Business: Poems Domestic and Wild was published by Finishing Line Press.  She won the Terry J. Cox Award for her full-length poetry manuscript, A Tune Both Familiar and Strange, released August 2025, which is available from Regal House Publishing. She lives in Berkeley with her husband.

                                        

 

Two Poems by Bernard Pearson

 

Sovereignty on The Sunday Before Easter



I found a dirty pound coin today,

One that I only sometimes knew I had.

Not one of the fresh minted

inimitable graven images,

But an old and gob caked sun

That had passed through

A thousand palms,

Been strewn across

A myriad counters.

It sang to me of its life

Among lower class coinage

Common fifty pence pieces

And chavvy twenty p’s.

How it had struggled

For traditional values

In dark pockets

Among the dumb grief

Of tear-stained tissues

And spent lottery tickets.

It was worth more than this.

It said, without a hint of bitter irony.




Transfiguration

Kafkaesque Scorpions

Scuttle to the rocks,

Their question mark tails

The last to disappear.

Mount Tabor

suitably desolate,

A piece of land

Scrunched up

like discarded parchment.

The light fading

In the distance over

The cobalt sea,

And yet still rising

From where he stood.

And the boat builder

With nails between his teeth

And the others

‘Fishermen out of water,’

And the two ancients dumb

From their work

And the Power and the Glory

For only he who knew the story

And the sand beneath their feet

And the hand of benediction

Left them after this assemblage

Knowing that though doomed,

they were replete.

Bernard Pearson's work appears in many publications, including; Aesthetica Magazine , The Edinburgh Review, Crossways, The Gentian, Nymphs The Poetry Village, Beneath The Fever, The Beach Hut Little stone. work coming up in Big Easy, and Orange Blush In 2017 a selection of his poetry ‘In Free Fall’ was published by Leaf by Leaf Press. In 2019 he won second prize in The Aurora Prize for Writing for his poem Manor Farm. He is also a Biographer and Prize winning short story writer.

Three Poems by Nolcha Fox

 

The Woman Is Off Her Meds

 

She planted all the pills in her new garden.

She hopes that they will come up daffodils.

 

The man outside her window stands in lamplight every night.

He whispers that her doctors are no good.

 

She wishes he would come up for a visit.

Instead, he grows some wings and flies away.

 

The owl in the tree says she should drive away to freedom,

before her daughter takes away the key.

 

The woman packs her suitcase full of popcorn.

She wears her best fur coat and sneaks away.

 

She thinks she’s in disguise, but no one wears fur coats in summer.

The police are watching every move she makes.

 

She hurries to the bridge, climbs on the railing.

They run to her and try to talk her down.

 

She says that she sees Jesus, and he’s smiling.

She takes a step, then everything’s ok. 

 

 

Degas Would Understand

 

The Degas prints of dancers haunted all my childhood dreams.

I would stretch, then leave the frame to float above the stage.

 

But I could never do the splits or jump into the air.

My ballet shoes bruised toes and bones. I left each dance class limping.

 

My body finally said enough. I had to concede failure.

I hid my beat-up ballet shoes behind my father’s toolbox.

 

Now I am far too old to dance, but I can still remember

the thrill of standing on the stage to dance into forever. 

 

 

No Words

 

You love your truck. You love those heated seats. You love how tires power through to conquer roads when asphalt ends. You love the crispness of the sound from speakers when you turn the volume up so windows rattle through the neighborhood.

 

You consider me too cold. You don’t know how to navigate my moods. You would rather drive away so you can’t hear my words.

 

You love your truck way more than you love me.

You leave tread marks on my back

as exhaust fumes fill the air.

Nolcha Fox’s poems have been curated in print and online journals. A best-selling author, her poetry books are available on Amazon and Dancing Girl Press. Nominated for Best Of The Net and Pushcart Prize multiple times. Editor of Chewers by Masticadores and LatinosUSA.

Website: https://writingaddiction2.wordpress.com/ and https://nolchafox2.wixsite.com/nolcha-s-written-wor/blog 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nolcha.fox/

Nolcha Fox
Editor Chewers by Masticadores

https://chewersmasticadores.wordpress.com/ 

Editor LatinosUSA

https://latinosenglishedition.wordpress.com/

 

Three Poems by Paul Connolly

 

Millennial 

 

The train arcs into the station,

the platform roof is bronzed

with a morning lick of rare sun,

the arc makes sunshine flame

and spark the bronze

like a forger’s sword work.

 

Shall I savour these announcements,

salute fellow passengers with ave atque vale

or tear my coat off into the forecourt winds?

 

Sky was red

but now above us all it lowers

bonfire powder and grit.

Avoiding each other’s looks

we walk down separate paths

to Münster.

 

A rutting pig, bloat in his bed,

speaking in tongues,

a new House of Atreus:

he will fertilise the earth

with death, quicken it with fire.

 

Our downward faces in puddles

discern the sky’s face

 

and some discern the signs

 

whiffs of morning assail, meat perfumes

and the sour patience of passengers

boarding a bus across the river.

Cold embraces, more intimate than a lover:

the river should warp,

crack upwards in a glacial thrust,

shatter the glass exoskeletons of City sentinels

and make flinders of blue and dirty sky

tinkle down on crystalline juts of wave

as all the temples tumble.

 

A tree burns

in a sudden plate-glassed sun storm.

 

Who is this other one of me

who sometimes beckons,

sometimes edges in beside me

and delicately touching my shoulder

whispers something? I smile,

nod and chant along.

 

6000 years is long enough.

 

We’d looked up into dawn’s remains

and the stars had fled before we reached them

even Venus

which held longer in the smallest ember

was soon away

and battered and terrified the moon has fled.

The river is high.

The preacher’s muted tuba rumbles on Jesus.

A bus brake screams like an eagle.

                                   

New scavengers may comb abundance,

rummage unsullied through filth and char

and make our refuse beautiful. In assurance

 

let them build upon the fathers of death

 

there will be something else, for now

already, newness now and strangeness

fumble for the land a moment,

grasp the land then moor securely, and look

 

look everywhere,

the new possessors are here already,

birthed easily, tall,

their steps earthed and purposeful.

 

Give way.

 

I am blind in the day’s night-time

or see night more clearly in the day

 

I can’t belong

 

I am a former thing

 

ignite me, make me fire

blacken the sky with me

 

I reach for your hand and yours

but you are gone into the blank

or into the freshness. I foresee it all

and fall into nothing now

and fade.

 

I won’t await another call

even if a call could come

 

and hailing the receptionist

across an acid gaze

that shows agreement or else

shows nothing and that’s agreement,

I mock the acts required,

Mr Wolf in every office smile,

what’s the time,

but populate the risk register,

what’s the time,

with new information,

stats marked red,

the time,

it’s late, it’s dinner time,

but everyone is calm and I am calm

 

and awaiting the broad finality, or mine

presaged by a rot-deep shade

my outline in the plasma screen

 

I know with sandwich-board precision

there’s been enough of this 

 

The Mark 

 

They bristled near him in the settlement as they bristled

at rats in the granary and coughed recognition at him

as he walked in silence to the fields and threshing.

He shivered them out from him, and they reformed

in milling circles of ungainly reverence

then fell back towards routine’s stockades.

Some whispered doubts: that eggy stain,

a finger of smut on his face for days.

Few gave him fellowship’s straight looks,

while he never reached for fellowship,

lived alone, venerated outcast,

and shared only cautious necessary words

with the other hands.

The Old Smith,

shoulders aslant, wave-steed in storm,

purblind, was the last who’d been there, apart

from him.

     The seeress danced a spell

a-jig many moments on a table-top.

She wailed conjurations, recalled the Smith,

fell words of warding from lips

cracked and frothy, her eyes asleep.

Then with a surprise bound into the bodies

she dismounted, her eyes blazed open

and she walked among them. She muttered and snarled

in the old tongue, hands clasped,

the left-hand forefinger pointing upwards

a cupped candle sharp and long,

then stopped before him. Six he was,

seven maybe, waiting at table,

a visiting chieftain’s ward, offspring

of a favoured slave freed near death.

The chieftain died a fortnight later.

The seeress stretched and exhaled at the heavens,

breathed all over the boy to mark him,

grovelled before him, motioned everyone

to grovel before him, then rose and left

in silence. ‘We never saw her again,

some said she walked into the sea,

others the wind.’ The Old Smith

spat and goggled warnings, then slept.

Smoke rose from the solitary hut,

the listeners shuffled a moment in fathomless

embarrassment, then dispersed.

                  For twenty summers

after the seeress danced and disappeared,     

more perhaps, princes of the blood,

drunks and children had brought their speculations

to ringed assemblies – rule and judgement,

perhaps, foresight for seafaring, battle,

or planting and the harvest, plucking out

diseased innards and sickening souls

with hands and glares and sorcery. He’d flailed,

grunted his resistance then hurled himself

before and across thresholds of trial

then back and through the jambs of failure,

sprawling in blood as each door slammed.

The public shows grew rarer as he aged.

He quashed the sights that rose on his wandering,

quashed the night-sweat promises, silenced

his solitary chants in mindlessness, and thought

he’d wait for better dreams, improve them

or better lose them all and dream

no more.

                Sometimes, visiting headmen

would stay him, stare demands, voice them,

even mock, ‘Tell us, fellow,

your secret purpose,’ then draw abashment

and mystery from the man’s mumbles at the dirt.

His acts wore away at belief,

the drool-tongue and grunts in the grinding house,

but fear rekindled in the wariness of virgins

or dogs, in sky fires and birdsong,

in the Old Smith’s stare, and the headmen

craving advantage, renewed the taboo,

watched and left.

                              Mist cracked

above them. Isolated handfuls of hail

scattered around. Their new chieftain

chuckled at their wonder and drove them on

in the season of egg foraging on the clifftops.

He ran his fingers in his beard, shaped it

with morning’s delicious dew then turned

and saw him, aquiver, at parley with the ground.

He walked towards him, hesitated,

then felt his own mark, abashed a moment,

swell again, felt it spread across his chest

and shoulders into his hands and gaze.

He stared at him and thought, ‘He blasphemes

worthiness and hope by standing useless,

or is he a trial of fidelity?’ A riddling

sanction or a moment’s worthwhile sacrilege

to quell the idiot shakes and muttering.

Fearing soil on his hands or nothing,

fearing flight or ghost returns

like foes or forefathers in dreams,

then fearing no man and no prophesy,

he snatched the slight, unprotesting trunk,

nothing he’d find a use for, watery,

irresolute, which juddered him yet with its slightness.

He wrestled it crossways and athwart his chest,

pinched it almost to the bones, and saw

the chewing mouth, an empty eyeball,

then hurled it at the wave-swept rocks below.

 

Worlds’ Ends

 

Frontiers are endings.

 

At Dunstanburgh Castle, rocks

pool with satanic green

while beyond them a pod of monsters

dolphins the waves. The cliff-face

riots with nursery keening,

the kittiwakes’ hell-child scream

of forbiddance. Basalt causeways

are stained sulphurous. A giant

has trodden on a rock plate,

almost capsized it slips away

endlessly towards its brink.

Sandstone walls are scraped

with salt fingernails

into ribs and veiny organism.

Remnant alcoves in the wells

of hollowed out towers

flensed of floorboard flesh

jut inwards and loom,

a soiled Nabatean necropolis.

 

There’s no one here:

the Harrying, the Thirties, endless

apologetic then relieved migrations

to hordes of clamouring southern

opportunity.

 

A lone rider

sauntered a Bamburgh strand

vast as sky.

 

In the sparsity

God’s voice echoes throughout

like waves,

he hopes for nothing

but fading of concern, consequence

 

But endings are frontiers

 

the stupidity of a globe is endings

are frontiers

 

Hadrian’s labourers left villages

and broad skies in low Tungria,

in flood-lashed low Batavia, then built

and climbed the Housesteads walls

and watched, grumbling that

eternity’s end was more eternity,

their limit one of many limits

where they stood and narrowed

across the boundless threat

 

Alone, high above desolate coastline

beyond the marshland on Lindisfarne –

unspared, despite the chantry –

he quivered and looked about,

fearful someone else would come

with ruinous chatter. His reveries

collapse in the same thought

at lonely rockpools. That couple

stalked him on the deserted beach.

In Lindisfarne’s barren carpark

a campervan had hugged in snug

beside his isolated Fiat, like someone

shuffling towards his adjacent seat

on an empty bus.

 

Later in the town, hikers loitered

for ages near the poo-bin

beside the Priory field

in shuffles of backpack,

alpenstock clatter, map consultation,

as he lunched on the bench opposite

and tried to recover

the morning’s composition of spectres,

before the sun’s democratic cathode

had bombarded dawn’s filminess

springing colour, weed and

adventive sprays of people.

 

Standing still in the haze

against the abbey ruin,

in front of the church,

on the skirts of a sloping field

checked and billowed by crows,

a solitary horse had poised a striped nose

and looked beyond him

through air watered grey

at St Cuthbert’s Island,

across scavengers on the low-tide causeway

towards a horse oblivion.

 

Now he looked for the horse again but now

or long since it had turned aside.

As he watched, it shook itself out

and wandered away.

 

Did Cuthbert need separation,

huge draughts of God,

to gird for ministry, temper healing,

like Wordsworth’s Wanderer?

 

Taciturn sorts are alone

even in workplaces,

or at the Christmas table

like his long-dead uncle Pete.

True cenobites are alone

despite their fellows, despite

the bartering world’s racket

at the abbey threshold. But craving

eremite annihilation

he carries crowds to the wilderness,

a vacuum, he sucks throngs

towards him

 

No escaping its tedious roll

he thinks on the castle ramparts

as he looks across the sea

for nothingness but almost spies

the hilly descent of sea beyond

 

then flattens the world.

Paul Connolly’s first poetry collection will be published by Broken Sleep Books in Spring 2027. Nominated for the Forward Prize and Best of the Net, shortlisted twice for the Bridport poetry prize, longlisted for the Orwell Prize in the blog category and for the Bridport novel prize, he has had poems published previously in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, as well as Agenda, The Warwick Review, Poetry Salzburg, Stand Magazine, The Reader, Scintilla, The Manchester Review, Chiron Review (USA), Dawntreader, takahē (New Zealand), Dream Catcher, Orbis, The Journal, FourXFour, The Seventh Quarry, Sarasvati, Envoi, Obsessed with Pipework, The Bombay Review, The Cannon’s Mouth, Southlight, Foxtrot Uniform, Guttural, The High Window, Nine Muses, Eunoia Review (Singapore), The Honest Ulsterman, Canada Quarterly, Unwhispered Legacy, The Book Bag, Cable Street, Ink Sweat and Tears, Littoral Magazine, Northampton Poetry Review, London Grip, The Saltbeck Orion, Wildfire Words, Sixty Odd Poets, The Courtship of Winds, and Quadrant (Australia). Shortlisted for the Charles Causley Prize and a finalist in the Walk:Listen:Create Walking at Night competition, he was highly commended in the Sentinel Quarterly and third in the Magna Carta Competition.