Grey's Book Club

By Martín Espada   —Barrio René Cisneros Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982 This was the dictator’s land before the revolution. Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis, his army brooding in camps on the border, and the congregation of the landless stipples the earth with a thousand shacks, every weatherbeaten carpenter planting a fistful of nails.

By Mark Strand   Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

BY OKUNOLA O. ZAINAB RORY He wasn’t a drinker but that night, his friends had forced him to the pub and had made him down a lot of booze. Now, he was regretting it. He had thrown up many times and was now feeling woozy and exhausted and to top it all, he had a splitting headache. He got home about half past eleven and went straight to bed but couldn’t sleep. He dunked his head under the pillow to keep the buzzing sounds in it out but they wouldn’t stop; It just kept buzzing like a stray bee had entered his ears up into his brain and had created a colony there. He went to the bathroom, washed his head, his face but it wouldn’t stop. Once he raised his head to look into the mirror, he saw what a mess of a man he had become. “ people like me” he scoffed and burst into a hearty laughter that drained away very quickly. He reached for the cabinet above the sink on the wall to reach for his pills; the ones that made him sleep or manage to keep the buzzing out of his head. He swall...