New England Review

Avia Tadmor

Song in Tammuz

Becalmed by Mattina Blue

                                                                    after Traci Brimhall 

The last time I saw my brother, he’d been dead
eighteen months and came as a ghost in the passenger seat,
his arm hanging out the window and whistling
an old boot camp song. He said
we were born on the two ends of Tammuz
and that our mother, ever since Dachau, knew God
wanted us close . . .

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Avia  Tadmor was born in Israel. She received her BA from Harvard University and is currently completing her MFA in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, where she also teaches undergraduate writing. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Crab Orchard Review, Adroit Journal, Apogee, Fugue, Cider Press Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Tadmor is the recent recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. She was named a finalist for the 2016 Indiana Review Poetry Prize.

New Poetry from NER 38.4

Wonder Days by Nomi Stone

Wind by Birgit Bunzel Linder

What I meant is that when the child shook the branch,
the beetles, quiet, somnolent, darkly, fell and again fell
like plums. Once woken, they bzzzed towards
the street lamps, loving each light well, thwacking 
against them until they landed face down or face 
up, trying to find their feet, reminding me of Eve’s face
as a baby when she tried to lift her head on her stem
of a neck before yet she could. Upon the child’s shoulders,
beetles landed, kinging him . . .

 

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Nomi Stone is the author of the forthcoming collection of poems Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008). A Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, Stone has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in New Republic, Bettering American Poetry 2017, The Best American Poetry 2016, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, diode, and elsewhere. “Wonder Days” was inspired by Thalia Gigerenzer’s podcast “On Wonder” (www.thaliagig.com/on-wonder/). 

New Poetry from NER 38.4

Immigrant Aria by Rajiv Mohabir

there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!
—D. H. Lawrence

Sunset by Ramsay Wise
To swallow new names like krill, dive.
You have few tides before you
return to motion. Once this shrine
was the abyssal plain. Once Empire
shackled you. Once you answered
to monster, to dragon, spewing steam, fire
bellowing in the furnace of your hide . . .


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Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry). In 2015 he was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award. Mohabir received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY, and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Auburn University.

New Poetry from NER 38.4

Fattest flies by Ronelda Kamfer

“Partners” by J. Ray Paradiso
there’s a new breed
of vintage-wearing brown girls
they started off by straightening their hair
and speaking English
had Foschini accounts
and rode only first class
the type that had boyfriends
when they were still just burks
that got offended
if I scanned something wrong at the till by Clicks
the type that kept that light skin gene
in the family
they were the prettiest girl
in the township
the type that’s pretty to coloured people
the type that believed an au pair in Europe
is a title
and married some unattractive old white guy
’cause ambition has a bank account
that’s gotta stay full

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Ronelda Kamfer’s debut collection, Noudat slapende honed (Kwela, 2008), received the Eugene Marais award, which she followed up with Grond/santekraam (Kwela, 2011), winner of the 2012 ABSA Kanna award. Her third collection, Hammie (2016), received the ATKV WoordTrofee award. All three collections have been translated and published in Dutch, and an Italian translation of Grond/santekraam will appear in 2018. She is an MA candidate at Rhodes University, and is married to cartoonist and poet Nathan Trantraal, with whom she has a six-year-old daughter named Seymour.

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