Brian Sneeden is a poet, literary translator, and editor. Sneeden’s poetry has received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry and the Indiana Review’s 1/2K Prize. His translations have received an National Endowment for the Arts’ Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and other recognitions.
Sneeden is managing and senior editor of World Poetry Books, where he has served as the team lead on books which have received both the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/de Palchi Book Award. Previously, a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.
CHIMERAS
Brian Sneeden
My daughter says she is the Wolf Singer.
She plants the vertebrae of her enemies
like seeds. She’s three.
I understand.
I too wear my antlers most of the time
now. It only hurts the first
hundred years. Sometimes she says:
I was here
before, I looked in the forest but
you were still a seed of you, not yet,
so I waited. In my daughter’s
rock garden, today is water’s birthday,
the moon is closing his eyes
for a haircut, and my secret crown keeps
getting caught on birds. Sing
with your first tongue
my daughter, we can’t afford to be
human long.