Lost in Translation — Blackbird Archive

← v18n1, Spring 2019

Ghosts often find themselves lost in translation.

They take a turn, and it turns out to be the wrong turn.

They rush by one another and their shoulders graze

Each other’s. It’s amazing how they manage

Not to knock the other to the ground or floor

Or third base because they do like to play baseball.

What was the name of that movie? I forget.

And yet I’ve seen them pitch and bat, or steal

To third or stick stock-still wherever they’re at.

mortality humor language

Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry is the author of seventeen books, eight chapbooks, and two works of translation. Her most recent titles are Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems (2007) and the novel In the Wink of An Eye (2004), both from Louisiana State University Press; History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope: Prose About Poetry (University of Tampa Press, 2005); We Can Still Be Friends , a novel (Soho Press, 2003), and the poetic sequence Welsh Table Talk (Book Arts Conservatory of Washington, D.C., 2004). She currently lives in Halifax, Virginia.