Contributors

Eléna Rivera
Contributor History

Biography
Eléna Rivera is the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and the author of Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006) and In Respect of Distance (Beard of Bees, 2007). Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secrets of the Breath is just out from Burning Deck Press, and other translations can be found in the Chicago Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and Tarpaulin Sky. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

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In Print

Vol. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

September 20, 2023
The Rachel stands tuned  
            to multiplicities, 
aslant in a territory of longing,
            where she becomes foreign.

            What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
            diffuse, multiple,  
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
            never only one.
September 13, 2023
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
September 6, 2023
Where the trees blackened, I saw,

Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.

It seems, although wildfires rage

Out of control, this world remembers

Some portion of its first purposes:

Superfluous beauty