Look! Look! Look! The dance
of these albatrosses in a sea, heaviness
like the iceberg of a frozen era!
(poetry)
Tag: Art
There was another reason why I opted not to become a doctor like my daddy. He was the only pediatric urologist in town, so he left for work before I woke, shuttled between two hospitals throughout the day, and returned home after my bedtime. Unbeknownst to me, when he would come to give me a goodnight kiss while I was fast asleep, I’d stick out my tongue at him.
(nonfiction)
The boy in the black carriage listens.
Solo in flight the starlings have no message.
They fly. He listens.
(poetry)
I like art best when its artifice dissolves. Pull back the curtain: It’s me, looking sheepish. Which me is almost irrelevant: I’ll answer to any name you call. Surrendering is only erotic when what you’ve held inside too long has named you. Made you its shape.
(nonfiction)
Danielle Steele’s Going Home, Alice Munro’s Dear Life. Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Ali flips open a moldy Farsi translation of The Three Musketeers, his eyes landing on “All falsehood is a mask” just as a slip of paper glides down onto the library’s patchy carpet.
(No Place is Foreign/fiction)
the opening of a cut grape
the butterfly
if it were to lightly rest upon the extremity of the grape
and pretend to drink
if it wasn’t drinking
what was to be done then?
I would have to
improve how well I see, with these eyes
improve how well I hear sounds
and so, employing my hands
I noticed
the smallest of movements
(translations)
“What do you know of killing a child?” Medea shouted, her voice trembling with the hereafter. The woman bowed her head, circling endlessly over rocky ground, stacking stones, whispering absence and omission as her weapons, searching for forgiveness that would never come.
(translations)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
wait, things improve, around every corner is a prize.
Let’s go back to that track and crush pine needles
with our heels. Crush our watches too.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
we’d just torn out not the eyes but the reflection in the eyes
while culture hanging on the media’s fangs was dying there
no more tongue-in-cheek now and above the vulgarity of
doing cartwheels thinking thus to prove its legitimacy
doesn’t the assassin push forward by brandishing his knife
(poetry/translations)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
See? I’ve been frank, while the TV keeps beaming images–you yelling at the cop dragging you away: Don’t take me away yet; but the cops keep manhandling you, smash your spectacles, your black skin shines with sweat.
(poetry)
