Public Republic

Aksinia Mihailova Photo: jenny downing neither is she approaching nor is she going away in the August haze I am holding her with my eyes above the poppy field not daring to move lest I make the wind blowing by my dispensable thoughts

Roger Craik Photo: HAMED MASOUMI Although he doesn’t know it, these days are the last Of his marriage. Perhaps he’s reading now On his side of the bed, beneath his lamp, while you Peruse the book of myths my father bought Second-hand, in England, twenty years ago. His name is written in the front, in […]

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s interview with poet Barbara Crooker Barbara Crooker is the author of more than 625 poems published in over 1925 anthologies, books, and magazines. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards, such as the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize. A twenty-six time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she was nominated for the […]

Yassen Vassilev Photo: kwerfeldein the one who gives birth to himself hardly suffers from oedipus complexes hardly knows electra closely he crawls as a snake out of the ground and evil omens thrive around

Ivan Hristov Photo: Cane Ludico Rosso For Vladimir Levchev And we were sitting there somewhere in our little country, in our little neighborhood, in our apartment building. We were sitting silently and drinking. And then we talked.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s interview with Heather Derr-Smith Heather Derr-Smith was born in Dallas, Texas but spent most of her childhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1998. Her first book, “Each End of the World” was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2005. Her second book, […]

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: Mzelle Biscotte Children With eyes like wastelands In scraped out faces, swirled Away from our innocence, In the outskirts of the world.

Bozhana Apostolova Photo: Just SallyRye Am I alive? I asked my body, which, having grown bigger with the years, felt in its bones the most delicious feast of worms digging through the earth. Am I alive? I asked my heart. (To make it hear me, I knocked with fingers somewhere on my left side.) The […]

Simon Perchik Photo: jenny downing At the end each dancer darkens bends through somewhere shallow and fronds floating on stage: the dam can’t hold and we are left to swim upstream, barely enough water to remember where –the dancers still clear, precise, scrambled the way a nightmare must sense how makeshift it is, weighs almost […]

Drew Logan Photo: foxypar4 I encountered Molly Peacock for the first time years ago on a bus in downtown Manhattan. She was driving. No! No! Please do not think she was driving the bus. There was a placard on the interior wall of the bus above the seats where they normally put advertising. It had […]

Jerry Ratch Photo: iowa_spirit_walker The line of the unemployed wrapped back on itself like an accordion pleat and extended all the way across a great hall and you could see the faces of them, bluish and drawn under the dim florescent lighting First in line were laid-off bees weeping with their wings hanging down dragging […]

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: twoblueday The cypresses, ah, the cypresses – slender shadows of radiant souls. Translated from Bulgarian by Valentin Krustev

Gerald Yelle Photo: aussiegall China were a far better partner than this Ferlinghetti of the brain, better than Discipline’s twin sister party favors, Maintenance and Flonase. They take, on the one hand, the flexing of a wrist to mean the same weak nod for as long as the moon captures daylight in its halo.

David Cazden Photo: opticalreflex Like dragonflies on a pond, two girls alight beside me in the college diner–Sali wears an August tan, a hair thin choker streaming around her neck, while the other, red headed, freckled with leaf shadow, stares into her book. Outside, box elders are flinging their doors

Cheryl Snell Photo: pixle I’m trimming my sister’s hair when Mother makes for the scissors. I’m the one, she begins. Her words sputter to a halt as I close the gaping blades. She stands, dwarfed in the kitchen she once ruled, and I see her as she was, bending low over the children’s curls, her […]

Bozhana Apostolova Снимка: crystalina Lord, what a huge void domain between stamens and constellations – shining chasms of scents, dimmed galactic abysmal spaces. And amidst them, without end resounds the deafening calm, uninhabited by eyes, by bees, wings and handpalms… There is no place for vacuum under the sky anymore… The world will simply collapse […]

Simon Perchik Photo: Clearly Ambiguous And forgetting too comes easier bending the Earth the way the old learn to see in the dark –I lose count to begin again, finger by empty finger touching my lips, expecting more silence though the baby has no room to make an arch, to feel the wind under one […]

Donal Mahoney Photo: lepiaf.geo Through the window I see the sun fire up for the last time today. There are jays in the trees near the meadow, crows in the grass I cut with a scythe early this morning.

George Fillingham Photo: ansik “Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes And slept.”          Wallace Stevens After Steven’s firecat Had bristled in the way Of the clattering bucks As they swerved To the left, and to the right, He slept. And as he slept, he dreamed.

Bozhana Apostolova Photo: Per Ola Wiberg Get up early. Carry on your shoulders the concern about the seed yesterday sown. Everyday there is something unfinished to be done: a cut conversation, an unfinished poem. Everyday there is something that has yet to be born or conceived. Go along the hard road of water and bread— […]