Poetrait of an Unknown Woman by Amedeo Modigliani

The Tambourine Girl by John William Godward

O Little Root of a Dream

O little root of a dream
you hold me here
undermined by blood,
no longer visible to anyone,
property of death.

Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth,
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,

even
here,
where you
refute me,
to the letter.


--Paul Celan

Asking for Everything

Nothing of this world will sound outside of me,
low-toned and holding,wringing your strings
and your scythes. Not one vent will blow.
No self-righteous mothers will fill
their sturdy shoes and you were never full enough.

Basil and spinach washed, draining
in the wire colander,chatty
as the sunburned throats of dead headed… roses.

If I put one leg around you in the night,
if I press your hands above your head:
have you ever seen such want?

You thought I literally drained every boy’s canteen
and every last quarter and washer was mine.
My bee balm, my soft spoken, unsayable—why look
at the want you carved out in me? Organize the chaste
and manic soil. It turns and turns like static
in your skirts, birds for your waist.
Talk it back into quietude.


–Lilah Hegnauer

Maude Nibelungen

Sulaiman Djaya, Self-Portrait

Seraphim of December

I know, you hide sometimes behind the spread of curtain,
which is you call green, luminescent of the weather,
to draw your eyes and as a gentle smile
that is equip by the beautiful.

And I can see the trail of October
on the Acacia green,
at the backs are born and old joke or respite,
when are leave release sake by the rain blown.
And dark lose it in the sheer.

And I'm wealthy yet to smell the dust aroma
that blossom to change now. To split up my song of incense,
as the split up of red the first Eve's world,
which was Adam driven out from heaven.

I know the destiny is hide in the February wind drip.
There it come the purple of misfortune
to freeze the light of tide up.
When the rain is gone, it certainly will be bronze.

And finally the white December has come,
grow from the drizzle.
And when the smell of water I breathe,
the first breezy tease. And gone to nowhere.

If there is something eternal,
then the wind is willing to right.

And finally the December is mine.
That's you called it the rose was left by the owner.


(Sulaiman Djaya 2006-2007).
Transl. from Indonesian into English by Eka Ugi Sutikno