Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

First stanzas of "After a Week of Sightings" published in The Malahat Review. Read the entire poem there.

The blue herons as opposed to what?

The stock exchange?

The history of the civil war?

The blue herons on the Yaddo lakes become

as important as a wind speaking

amenamenamen

They become so much more real

than the people I sit with at dinner,

yes, more real perhaps, because my mind

fills up with them

and when I startle the dervishes

from the marsh grasses and they rise, unsettled,

disturbed and winging across the lake,

lurching, looking for another place to hide,

I sense the energy of plan,

their weighing up the nearness that snaps

First stanzas of "School for Pears," first published in the Kansas Quarterly. Read it there.

Learn about the clouds

Idle as sheep,

flocking on the downstream

or the upstream current,

unaware of tomorrow.

Learn to hang

in the gathering summer.

Not like bats

who snap open

when night pours out,

or spiders

who rappel the air

tied down.

Learn silence,

with juice darting 

under the surface, rowdy

with earth tastes

suffusing the flesh.

Learn to swell completely

without breaking

waves of skin.

"At Three or Four" first published in the Kenyon Review.  This poem is complete as is.  It was translated at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam into Dutch.

As if hearing thunder, far off,

I wake up at three or four,

the dark a musty breathed-up closeness

and turn my pillow over.

It's like a voice or voices,

powerful, carrying convincing waves.

Often there's even a tomb.

I feel my heart pounding

as if I were living a consumed dream,

the warm

comforter no longer such.  Something.

Don't sleep one minute more.

The Man from Hiroshima
Maurizio Chierici
Translated by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
'Then the explosion stunned me momentarily. Hiroshima disappeared under a yellow cloud. No one spoke after that.'

https://granta.com/the-man-from-hiroshima/

The first fragment in "The Plant of Dreaming"

a page is

large like

a sip

a

breath before

going under.

"I don't know if I would ever have discovered music if I had not been seized and taken over by it again outside Moscow in November 1991. I was part of a group of western writers exchanging ideas with ex-Soviet ones."

"The butterfly was as small for a butterfly as I was tall for a woman. What I mean is that the orange-winged creature that zigzagged onto my shoulder on a May day in Parma, Italy, where I was talking to the postman, was not much larger than two of my unpainted fingernails."

"Over time, in the summing of any deep relationship, who gives and who receives? Where is the scale upon which affections can be weighed? How far do cracks reach in a mirror of water?" Iris Origo is writing in Italian about her friendship with Elsa Dallolio. The portrait--mainly shards from letters--is a rare cameo of an almost invisible genre: a woman putting into words the image of a woman friend."

Published in London magazine:

Once I never thought of knowing
writers, people who filled
pages with adventures, but more

interesting inner life
hearing songs inside the lilacs
penning phrases like 'you must change your life'

now in most astounding freedom
I have shelves of books signed
not in shopping center malls

but by people whose ways I follow
yet it was not knowing writers
that changed me

nor knowing even that I could write
but knowing there were eternal
ways words bring water to a desert.