Featured Poet: Stefania Heim

Stefania Heim is co-founder and co-editor of CIRCUMFERENCE, a bi-annual journal of poetry in translation. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University's School of the Arts and her poems,translations, and reviews have recently appeared in the Boston Review, Harp & Altar, Harper's Magazine, and La Petite Zine, among other publications. She is currently a poet in residence in the Chicago Public Schools through the Poetry Center's Hands on Stanzas program and the grant writer for Artists Space, a non-profit art gallery in New York City.

The Dream Is About Us


Attempted to pilfer the definition of homesickness.
Grass level, gentle slope. To those plagued by guilt,

may there be continuous planning
for the unimaginable. Greater care in the loading

and unloading of hearts. Winter looms.
Its are a practical range of demands. It is beautiful

to imagine inevitability. Dropped, meaning planted.

Wait for Me, Sugar


A man is crawling and a woman
is on fire. Cloud of heads. Porcupine
of weapons. Somewhere is someone
holding open a book. This is
Judas kiss. Do not suffer me.

Compulsory Song


Someone is lost upon the water. I am low
again. Shaping my nails toward something

rounder, shouldering future until it is warmer.
The hateful in expectation is the lonely

in windows. Someone is making a point,
an artist's project. Today,

all our furniture is inexplicably removed.
A moister morning, unexpectedly close and cool.

We have lost some thing enormous:
in the mud, at the mouth of the bay.

And a Table That Goes On for Miles


The women’s legs look better every year.
His basement, still strung with noosed

ham thighs. There is a cemetery
of stacked boxes and he has loved

it for its photographs. Above his arched
valley, there is the stench of burning

fields. Who built these kennels? And who
is this lovely one insisting: Water runs now,

we have husbands. We don’t need you. As though
he could wake and believe that his country was real.

© 2007 Stefania Heim