Category Archives: from the editors
At the Vent at Delphi
At the Vent at Delphi
Stop with me here.
The footholds that you see,
the rotting ladder down–
no one climbs back.
The air has a green taste.
It tells what people want to know,
what you will ask to know,
things no one should know.
Cities form here, children and gold,
the blood of battle on the stones.
Strangeness past telling–
the half-born, malformed,
godlings, beasts who struggle and fall.
Here all issues and is strange.
I have answered? And you do not understand?
It makes no matter.
We cannot open the box words make.
Walk with me, if you will.
The walls of the village gleam.
Limbs stir the moon.
The plastered stones speak.
The leaves speak.
Here too all issues and is strange.
gateway
to die at sunrise in a dream with no curtains
where all colors but one have disappeared
and a shadow still warm from the night
drifts away from the bed
where a woman humming before the mirror
disentangles the young sun from the honey
of her hair and sends it up to the sky
like an orange-breasted falcon and
the room darkens and the horn
comb drops on the carpet
where a slim-winged julia wakes up among the impatiens
to a landscape of saffron and tangerine merging
into a moist horizon and summons the monarchs
by a sun salutation dance and the swarm flies
to the one-lane-road-ahead sign and
makes for the growing tower
and when the pilgrims reach the glow
at the top of the amber tower
the dream ends
Previously published in New Mexico Poetry Review and Dream Diary (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013).
january 3: chicago river
acrylic on matboard, 20×20 inches
Like Father, Like Son: A Narrative in Poetry & Guitar
a murder
acrylic and ink on matboard, 16×20 inches
Letter from Motherland
My Faraway Daughter,
A good thing you’ve decided to write the story of your life
and to start with your first winter. What was it like?
you ask. I remember
I’d wake up at five and stare at the nightlight. I’d study
the mist of my breath, feel the formidable cold
of the stove.
Not a stove – a block of black ice that has invaded us
through the chimney, an informer, ensconced in a dark
overcoat, writing down the colors of dreams.
A stove so like the stocky man who took away your father
for owning a degenerate capitalist record:
Elvis’ Christmas Album.
This happened on a strangely warm day, like spring:
December 13, 1957.
Then temperatures dropped by 60 degrees.
Cloaked in a blanket, I’d descend to the basement.
Back with a bucket of coal. Feed the stove.
But the matches would break. Some would just smoke
without flame.
Finally, the damp, unread newspaper caught fire.
The splinters screamed but didn’t wake you up.
Only when the fire began to hum
your gray eyes opened huge
to the stove’s red riot, its round lid jumping up.
I’d extract you from Grandma’s embroidered coverlets
warm and wet. The day began
with your tiny, sharp fingernails on my swollen breast.
The robust certainty of your lips: you will not starve.
Your bottom – washed, dried, talcumed, kissed
almost sitting on a cloth nappy warmed by the stove.
Your toothless grin. My vow to spare you
true stories, false friends, and the wearing of black.
As the day unbundled its face, I’d go about my chores
thinking up answers to the questions
you’ll start asking soon
after you eat from another tree.
Will write again.
Love,
Mom
The Old Building
The Old Building
By Zeina Hashem Beck
Floor I
Water could not reach higher
than the first floor those days,
(that is what I recall)
so we spent our mornings going up
and down, up and down
to the first floor,
with buckets in our hands.
Mama sometimes sang and said
she had a great voice
and could’ve been a star.
I climbed and thought her voice
lifted the heat for a while,
resembled the water in our hands,
reflected the color in her eyes—
blue, inevitable, clear,
as I plunged into it and sang.
The stairs were more crowded
than the streets,
as if life were transferred
to that vertical world with yellow walls,
and permeated the small bullet holes.
Floor IV
I don’t remember anyone’s
name, except for the oldest son Yasseen,
whose madness imposed itself on us,
whom we found from time to time,
unconscious on the night stairs,
like a garbage bag at our feet.
Floor V
Umm Jamal’s laughter trembled,
settled in the fat around her waist.
As I ate she insisted
that I eat everything with bread,
told me her granddaughter
loved ketchup too.
One day she dusted her photo frames,
arranged them in sunlit angles,
braided her long winter hair in a bun,
pinned it to the back of her head
and stopped aging.
Floor VII
Raymond lived with his mother
who went sideways down the stairs,
click, click, slowly, click,
(they say the war disturbs your walk).
Sometimes he sang in the shower
“Hiroshima, Hiroshima,
boom boom boom,
boom boom boom,”
until the ambulance flickered in the dark
like an ominous red star.
One day on the stairs,
time decided to
stop, cut itself in two,
let Raymond descend
from his room on the seventh.
I looked and told myself,
“Do not fear poor Raymond,
poor Raymond, he’s so calm.”
Floor IX
Ammo Jawad couldn’t part
with the city, and its cafés, its streets.
On nights when the heat
grabbed you by the throat,
he slept on the balcony, smoked cigars,
wrote to his family in Dallas,
scribbled Arabic poetry across the sky
and dreamt
of the sixties, of fields of wild thyme
and a cold light breeze.
Floor VI
The beautiful mother with blue eyes
shouted to the grocery store
from the balcony every other day,
I can still hear her say,
“Tomatoes, rice, tissues and
Always, Always,
the thin ones please.”
The father smoked Gitanes and
politics, wanted to change his car,
wanted to change his life.
He sang me to sleep every night,
planted my name
among olives and jasmine trees.
The little girl with crooked teeth
biked on the balcony with her brother,
remembers nothing of the civil war,
except a man singing to Hiroshima,
buckets filled with water, stairs,
and a little candle in the corridor
lit so she won’t be afraid of the dark.
(previously published in Copper Nickel)