after Agha Shahid Ali’s “Arabic” At springtime—Persian new year—we circle around the warmth of bonfires to chant, Give me your color, take back my sickly pallor. There is rebirth in this language. A groom exchanges vows with his Persian bride in a foreign tongue.
They skim
the trees along
the road we’re cycling down,
and rise on billowing gusts across
the countryside
He hands me the bottle,
for the grace and rite.
Dream is a noun for possibilities, as in everything reminds me of threat
You are now a possibility in the whole country, // traversing the once-border—that no one sees—
Bronka Nowicka’s poems, “Tights” and “Stone,” translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster, appear in the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Fall 2019 Europe issue. Tights It likes the taste of a knee. In the summer, it has mouthfuls straight from the skin, in the winter, through