Near the Naked Juices I passed
A man my fingers walking
Across his back he turned and held up
A box said what
Might this be I said oh
You’re tactile too what’s your name
He said William Amos Miller I said
I thought you were born in 1872 he said so
You know who I am yes you’re the man
Who journeyed to the center of Earth
In your mind he smiled on my arm said do
You know that the Earth also journeyed
To the center of my mind I said
I never thought of that he asked
Again about the box I shook it sniffed
Said Mike and Ike is it fruit
He inquired not exactly well
I think I shall have an apple wait
You haven’t paid oh
My money nowadays is no money he pushed
Outside we walked across the ice
To the intersection he made to go across
Wait you can’t go across we have to wait
For help oh help he said crouching
Until our hands touched the cold ground
He said I said we said we see
With our hands I jumped up and said you’re the man
*
ALI COBBY ECKERMANN
Kulila
sit down sorry camp
might be one week might
be long long time
tell every little story
when the people was alive
tell every little story more
don’t forget ’em story
night time tell ’em to the kids
keep every story live
don’t change ’em story
tell ’em straight out story
only one way story
all around ’em story
every place we been
every place killing place
sit down here real quiet way
you can hear ’em crying
all them massacre mobs
sit down here real quiet
you can feel ’em dying
all them massacre mobs
hearts can’t make it up
when you feel the story
you know it’s true
tell every little story
when the people was alive
tell every little story more
might be one week now
might be long long time
sit down sorry camp
*
KARL KNIGHTS
A Field Guide to Stares
There’s the curious stares,
often from parents or old ladies.
They want to know more,
but don’t know how to ask.
The gawkers. They want to know
what’s wrong with you.
You’ll want to punch
these people.
The friend. You spy
the strap of a splint
as they walk. You stare.
They stare back. You both smile; nod.
The anxious. The temporarily abled,
my friend calls them. They see
a possible future,
scowl and turn away.
*
SHIKI ITSUMA
Loam
I work
the soil it echoes with the footsteps of the world
I make my body tremble like a fallen leaf and sink
and I thirst for words of life which may bud in tomorrow’s loam
Everyone seeks from the sown seed
that by which green aromas and harvest
plot cause and consequence into a single course
The sweat I sweat from this dabbling is lovely
Deaths by atom bomb the chill touch of bones
blood dripping the races and borders
of billions of people Here we break them up
and compost sorrow
I
falteringly with numb hands work the soil beneath my feet
To these mud-clotted roots which someday will lengthen in the dark
to this loam the universal womb
all I do is listen
(translated from the Japanese by John Newton Webb)
Contents List
9. Introduction
13. Acknowledgements
15. Khando Langri | Medicine mantra for the road
16. Jen Campbell | First Thing, I Am a Forest
18. Stephen Kuusisto | Night Seasons
20. Lateef McLeod | I Am Too Pretty for Some ‘Ugly Laws’
22. John Lee Clarke | At the Holiday Gas Station
23. Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay | Misfit
24. Linda Hogan | When the Body
26. Janet Frame | I Take into My Arms More Than I Can Bear to Hold
27. Jane Burn | An Evanescent Garden
28. Airea D. Matthews | Eviction
30. Chisom Okafor | In another life, I am twenty-two, gifted and curious
31. Ada Limón | The Endlessness
32. heidi andrea restrepo rhodes | A Small Disunified Theory
34. Sandra Alland | having been
35. Andy Jackson | Song not for you
36. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha | Crip fairy godmother
42. Hoshino Tomihiro | Chewing My Pen
44. Roddy Lumsden | Against Complaint
45. Kerri Shying | and bulbul means heart
46. Naomi Ortiz | Epicenter
48. Meg Day | It Must Still Be Summer
50. Erica Mena | from Featherbone
52. Paul Celan | Afternoon with Circus and Citadel
53. Osip Mandelstam | ‘Having deprived me…’
54. Jack Mapanje | Skipping Without Ropes
56. Sarah Lubala | 6 Errant Thoughts on Being a Refugee
58. Ali Cobby Eckermann | Kulila
60. Steffi Tad-y | Duplex Ukol Sa Utang Na Loob
61. JK Anowe | a musical malady
62. Riyad al-Saleh al-Hussein | The Sleeping Boy
64. Khairani Barokka | Tub
65. Urvashi Bahuguna | Medical History
66. Raymond Antrobus | For Tyrone Givans
68. Karthika Naïr (& Marilyn Hacker) | from A Different Distance
73. William Soutar | The Room
74. Erez Bitton | You Who Cross My Path
75. Hàn Mặc Tử | Here in Vĩ Dạ Hamlet
76. Masaoka Shiki | 1898 Summer
77. Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez | Evening Summer Rain
78. Kay Ulanday Barrett | Sick 4 Sick
80. Kathryn Gray | Bournemouth
81. Therese Estacion | The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)
82. David Wheatley | Dyspraxia Ode
84. Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze | riddym ravings (the mad woman’s poem)
88. Levent Beşkardèş | V
90. Petra Kuppers | Craniosacral Rhythms
91. Shahd Alshammari | Injections
92. Dean Atta | Five Litres of Blue
93. Ona Gritz | No
94. Nuala Watt | Disabled Person’s Travel Card
96. Mishka Hoosen | What wasn’t said to the doctor
98. Kate Davis | Hand-writing practice
99. Kerry Hardie | Flesh
100. Lucia Perillo | Shrike Tree
102. Stephanie Heit | ETC. THE RESISTANCE
104. torrin a. greathouse | Essay Fragment: Medical Model of Disability
105. Madailín Burnhope | Camel Girl
106. Daniel Sluman | the beautiful
107. Yu Xiuhua | A Leaky Boat
108. Cynthia Huntington | The Rapture
110. Jamie Hale | Fibrotic
112. Gwyneth Lewis | Will I?
113. Iyanuoluwa Adenle | Beneath the Waves
114. Adrienne Leddy | Erupture
116. Rachael Johnson | You Tear Out My Tongue
117. Leroy F. Moore Jr. | Disabled World Nation
120. Ilya Kaminsky | That Map of Bone and Opened Valves
121. Abdullah al-Baradouni | Why I Am Silent about the Lament
122. G.N. Saibaba | A Sparrow in My Cell
125. Les Murray | Dog Fox Field
126. Gaele Sobott | Exuviae
128. Anita Endrezze | Song-Maker
129. Megan Fernandes | Letter to a Young Poet
130. Lisa Kelly | Blackbird and Beethoven
132. Joanne Limburg | The Alice Case
134. Frank Ormsby | Once a Day
135. Zuo You | Bluff
136. Brandi Bird | Ode to Diabetes
138. I.S. Jones | Self-Portrait as the Blk Girl Becoming the Beast Everyone Thought She Was
140. Selima Hill | Snouts
141. Karl Knights | A Field Guide to Stares
142. Saleem Hue Penny | Tinniō
144. Kei Miller | The Subaltern Dreams of Big
146. Gayle Kennedy | After Viewing the Carved Trees Exhibition
149. Shiki Itsuma | Loam
150. Agha Shahid Ali | Not All, Only a Few Return
151. Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb | Rain Song
155. Golan Haji | from A Soldier in a Madhouse
156. Cyrée Jarelle Johnson | Now Let the Weeping Cease
157. Cat Chong | —I accept the task from the sun—
158. Anthony Vahni Capildeo | Plague Poems
161. Polly Atkin | Breath Test
162. Hannah Hodgson | Dancing with a Doctor
163. Kwame Dawes | Keratoconus
164. Aaron Kent | Scabies vs Predator
165. Nat Raha | [subterranean / dreaming grace roots]
168. Josephine Dickinson | Alphabetula
169. Jane Kenyon | Having It Out with Melancholy
174. Pascale Petit | Bac du Sauvage
175. Maya Abu al-Hayyat | You Can’t
176. Biographical notes
198. Selected reading list
200. Publication acknowledgements
207. Index of poets & translators
