It rejoices over Japan, over Korea,
over arts refined over a thousand years—
the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea.
Rejoices over the poet, that his heart still beats.

Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide
the pistil and the pollen inside.
Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands,
over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening.

"Poetry rejoices..."
By Håkan Sandell
Translated By Bill Coyle

Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,
over the girl with her first electric, how her high,
thin voice, amplified many times
over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's
in the green grass of the festival site.

There’s something mentally wrong with the President of the United States.

The fake disease that fooled the internet — and what it says about all of us Why do we trust the wrong people and doubt the right ones? An experiment in lying reveals some uncomfortable truths.

"Our collective capacity to recognise false information is also at risk. This is because, as a society, we continue to promote the importance of hard science subjects at the expense of the critical thinking skills derived from studies of the arts, humanities and social sciences."

Or an assassin bug squatting over us,
shoving a proboscis right through
our breast plate then sipping.
How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

Further and further into the weeds.
We have absolutely no proof
god isn’t an insect
rubbing her hind legs together to sing.
Or boring into us like a yellow jacket
into a fallen, overripe pear.

But I ain’t confessing nothing.
On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds
that don’t have names either.
I do not remember the word dew.
I do not remember what I told you
with your ear in my teeth.

Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight
in snow that lasts about twenty minutes
longer than a life held together
by the twisted silver baling wire
of deception and stealth.

You start taking down the walls of your house,
sooner or later it’ll collapse
but not before you can walk around
with your eyes closed, rolled backwards
and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker
and your own damn self hanging there.

Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself
I’ve got these words that mean completely
different things inside myself
and it’s tearing me apart?
My errors are even bigger than that.

You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,
try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm
in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know
it’s the quickness of its death that reveals
the quality of the product, its proof.
I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office
with an ignored view of the river
pretending to be asleep, pretending
to have insight into its muddy self.

Selected Recent and New Errors
By Dean Young

My books are full of mistakes
but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out
as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt
the new kid caught his arm in.
Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred