Art and shiny things…
Somewhere out there, an operator plugged in
the wire of your voice to the switchboard
of Arkansas where I am
happy to accept the charges—an act so antique
I think of Sputnik beeping
overhead, lovers petting in Buicks
and glowing with the green of radium dials.
But what you’ve called to say is lost
in the line’s wreckage of crackle and static.
read more at Condofire
It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols – which of course are manifold – symbols
of so much else? What’s amiss with simply the huddle
and glut of bees, with those fuzzed globes
by the hundred and the clipped out sky
beyond them and the leaves that are black
if you angle the sun directly behind them,
being themselves, for themselves?
I want to tear a page from the book of alliterations.
To get lost in an orange grove where blossoms
abound but bear no fruit. Here, they are losing
their language, but remember enough
to know what’s been forgotten. Still the women speak it
to dishtowels and bathwater. Sweep bits of it off the floors
and call it dust. There is never anywhere that isn’t here.
I’ve learned that more times than I can count before now.
Before now became then. Before then
became us. Before us ever was. I’m told
there was a tree
the lyrics do not translate
arabic is all verbs for what stays
still in other languages
تصبح to morning what the
translation to awake cannot
honor cannot contain its rhyme with
تسبح to swim t to make
the night a body of water
i am here now & i cannot morning
i am twenty-three & always
sick small for my age & always
translating i cannot sleep
through the night
no language has given me the
rhyme between ocean &
wound that i know to be true
sometimes when the doctors
draw my useless blood i feel
the word at the tip of my tongue
halim sings أعرق a’raq
I am drowning i am drowning
the single word for all the water
in his throat does not translate
halim sings teach me to kill the
tear in its duct halim sings
i have no experience in love
nor have i a boat & i know he
cannot rest cannot swim
through the night
i am looking for a voice with
a wound in it a man who could
only have died by a form of
drowning let the song take
its time let the ocean close
back up
-Safia Elhillo, winner of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize
In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed,
the mushroom scent lingers.
As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.
As a person who’s once loved completely,
a country once conquered,
does not release that stunned knowledge.
Jane Hirshfield, Writer’s Almanac
When her sister moved across the border
there was no border, not even a line
like the one they’d drawn in chalk
down the centre of their bedroom,
dividing walls and window, the light
parsed out between them
like a parent’s love. Only the door,
its point of entry and exit, was shared.
read more
Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Cura Mag
What was it he needed to read? There was a book on one
of the shelves. He only remembered the cover was green.
88 keys, 11 octaves. After daily exercises,
the lid came down on a felt runner of green.
The first year is paper, the eighth bronze, the twelfth
silk or linen; the sixteenth, a candlestick silvery-green.
What trees grew in front of our first house? One
shed only flame-colored leaves, the other green.
One arrow struck the girl, the other struck the god. He pursued her,
even as her feet grew roots, her arms leafed over with green.
Near the water, there used to be a house of quarantine. On a short
stretch of road, broken shells in the gravel amid tufts of green.
Should your mind quietly open that side door and leave, what
will you remember of us, of our days greener than green?
-Luisa A Igloria, Via Negativa
I could not predict the fullness
of the day. How it was enough
to stand alone without help
in the green yard at dawn.
How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.
And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,
brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.
-Susan Glassmeyer
We used to overturn rocks on the shore
and expose them to the belly of the sun.
I knew that some rocks should not be moved
but you picked them up to skip pebbles
and slice fountains in the sea
where they were lost
and you were satisfied
because yours had skipped the farthest
and the deepest
while mine grew steam in my palm.
Your hand in mine was sandpaper.
When you closed your fingers I was a bottled neck
with no wings flapping but the heartbeat
of one chipped stone against another.
read more at Cadence Collective
-Robin Dawn Hudechek
the trees react to colder nights by stripping naked
the meadow too
it’s as if they’re about to set off somewhere
all excess baggage is left at the gate
the sun too is a budget traveler
abandoning most of the sky
the days are so quiet now
take me with you
even if there’s nowhere to go
even if it means leaving myself behind
-Dave Bonta, Gnarled Oak
Coffee and Irony 