Miroslav Tichý. Source: lempertz.com
*
My hunger for love exceeds me
Which has been a continuous annoyance
.
Although possibly a passe
But I do love both women
And the people who imagined God differently
It is a strange game
Sebastião Salgado, Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet), Istanbul, Turkey, 1999. Source: artsy.net
WE THE MORTALS
Away from what you leave behind
a five year old Amine in Guatemala
a tormented gaze in Ras Beirut
or bulging eyes missing the ceiling
eyelashes napping for eternity
your destiny awaits you.
Grief for the ones who cared
decomposition for your filaments
calcium your only index.
James Flynn, UV reactive acrylic on panel, 2019. Source: insidenola.org
SHAMSUDDIN OF THE ULTRAVIOLET
.
Mohammad Shamsuddin left the blue planet
after he played Death for a long time,
thinking he’d fooled it for years.
.
At the demise of every year,
he would stall Azriel
with offerings cut off his living flesh.
Maged Zaher by Youssef Rakha, Oldish Cafe, 12 August 2021
To Youssef Rakha
Revolution is a brand
Come again in proper clothes
And say that you love me
Do this before I die
My body is good for figure drawing
It is dark enough
And it has unusual curves
I’ve never used the word “adhesion” in my poems
I am tired
I am actually dead
But having dinner
I don’t exist here
I arrived earlier
To have coffee
And read literature
Early on
I loved everyone
I also
Hated myself
The good part
Is that all of us will perish
A photograph of a photograph of Bernard Pivot (centre) at a family gathering in the 1980s. Source: Wikipedia
Back in the day,
three princes of the word
Mohammad Choukri, Charles Bukowski and Marc-Edouard Nabe
graced your show on three separate occasions.
Before a live audience, along with mediocrities
you collectively scorned and bullied Choukri,
whose magnificent retaliation framed your pettiness in a flash.
You disdained and pushed Bukowski out of your set
for legendarily being himself: a celestial drunk.
And with the help of half-witted guests you demonized the young and fresh Nabe
for being brilliantly talented, sharp-tongued, with tons of integrity.
Youssef Rakha, Eagle Shadow, 2021
I was not born on the mountaintops. but from the first the sea was my destination. wrestling the ghosts which pursue me was my singular work. exemplary. no, sadly. no, I was not born upon the mountaintops. and my childhood was without gardens. When I let my ghosts drift away to distant lands. I found night at my bedroom window. and I did not stop. until I grew tired of watching the stars. the day I lost my innocence in a whirlpool of light. and hated the sight of my city by day. I had to do something with myself. took time as my enemy before I knew what it was. and became used to sitting on the riverbank. watching the water as it ran on its way. caring nothing for associations of place. I learned to walk in streets that remained nameless. at least to me.
The butterfly that flies as if
tied by an invisible thread to paradise
almost brushed my chin while I sat in the garden
drinking my first coffee
shaking last night’s nightmares out of my head
lolling in the sun
I saw it drift over the wooden fence
like a dream or a prayer, what was
only yesterday a caterpillar
locked up in its tight cocoon.
Alfred Wallis, St. Ives, 1928. Source: tate.org.uk
[Architecture]
.
To build something together one last time
there are so many questions,
like who would live there,
and if no one, why build it?
.
In our panic we make a house
that looks like a boat,
which reminds me of dreaming
both of us were angels, sleeping at sea.
.
When we lay the boat down
in the cemetery of love,
we squat over one of its three windows,
and wave to ourselves through the glass.
Rashid Diab, Out of Focus, 2015. Source: artauctioneastafrica.com/
How long is a life avoiding the beach? believing God spoke through my father some found seashell pushed off a shelf I cannot bury. I’d like to think there are aisles of men praying somewhere once I’m gone/that their tongues wrap around where I kept warm like a turban woven in prayer by strangers/that I am not found stiff/half hanging off a hotel bed under a phrasebook in another useless language/I hope I go dreaming in Arabic/because love there sounds like the wind passes through every vowel/somewhere buried in my voice there is asphalt singing as brothers build rooms for one another/I find new corners in case I come back/everyone gets a duaa to float across the lake and watch disappear/this is mine.
K. Eltinaé is a Sudanese poet of Nubian descent. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, The African American Review and About Place Journal, among others. He can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Head of the wife of an Ooni, the traditional ruler of the ancient Yoruba city of Ile-Ife, 1930s. Source: 1stdibs.com
(For Onnie)
I have tried to count our minted coins:
They are Z+ of integers slipping through mind
Like a money changer sans numismatic head.
Perhaps I am a failed Pythagorean
Perhaps I am a failed mathematicist
That I have always been all my life.
Martin Roth, from “i grew grass on rugs in a castle”, 2012/19. Source: martinroth.at
Charity
the goat has eaten all the grass he can reach on his short tether. the ground around him is bare. he kicks up roots and gnaws on those. he has dug himself into a hole. his tether is a metal chain. he tries to bite into it.
the grass beyond his reach is tall and lush and ripe green. the child tries to yank up the grass but its grip on the ground is too strong. inside, on the wall, is a rusty sword. the child remembers about it, runs inside, climbs on a stool and lifts it down. it is heavy but not too heavy.
Frida Kahlo, “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale”, 1938. Source: wikiart.org
for Stan Lee
I
In Which we Meet the Suicidal God
As silence booms in a dark room whose only light
is the dying kind radiating off a dying laptop,
Dave Daggert, a desolate, destitute young man,
just days from drowsing off at his own college graduation,
stirs what his dealer calls Dragon’s blood
into his glass of Jack Daniel’s and dry gin.
Soon, he thinks: my past-sins and would-be failures will
be flushed into the bin. Excusing his confusing of
toilets and trash cans, we must be patient with young,
desperate Dave for he knows not what lies in store for him.
Harry Gruyaert, Tokyo, 1996. Source: magnumphotos.com
At least one of the panes in the warped and brittle frame was cracked enough to need a newspaper. You never bothered to replace it. From the desk, you looked across a small patch of gravel at another rowhouse, another upstairs window. Sometimes, a face would appear between the curtains, then vanish. You didn’t know it, but just a few years before a poet had died just a few doors up the street. The Greek Revival is brittle, and brick. The room is yellow and small and has a ceiling fan. On the wall, there’s a thriftstore reproduction of Goya’s little boy in red with all his birds and cats, next to him, a postcard of a coffin.
Julian Schnabel, “Anh in a Spanish Landscape”, 1988. Source: thebroad.org
an authentic corruption
There is a corruption as old as being. We can see it in all things. Say, in language: each word a holed ship leaking meaning as it goes down. And in vision: between picturing and the picture a missing link continually dilating until it swallows both. There is an authentic corruption.
In fractal geometry we are able to measure. This is the miracle. Also, the impossibility of measuring. This is the catastrophe.
The great erasure which is happening now in the world is the work of souvenir collectors. The souvenir being the most valuable thing there is. It is the hardest currency. And the collectors think: it must not be left to the masses.
we are living the greatest loss
in history
a common loss
a common loss of memory
Hassan Ammar (AFP), Beirut, 19 October, 2019. Source: off-guardian.org
after & for Ghassan Hage
The day is forecast as catastrophic. Heat
strangles the sky. It bulges, a rotten purple.
Earlier, an old Greek and a friend unexpected
slipped into my sleeping throat to see
why I bulged, rotting within: a history
believed in, threatens to become faith
in a future―didn’t anyone tell you
never to eat a seed? Oh it grows, it grows.
You must lose this weight to be at ease.
Anna Boyiazis, from “Finding Freedom in the Water”, Zanizibar, 2018. Source: lifestyle.luxusni-bydleni-praha.com
Tremolo Provocateur
untuned time
those improvised lines
unearthed tragedies
awaited
agency is someone else’s fortune
when all they see
genres of what we be
عيون ترسم واقعا لتلوم ما لم يكن
ويغدو الآخر في خيال مقتبس
Northumberland Bestiary (Detail), 1250–60, courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
Call me blood,
brother. Crouched
ogre gathers
forces together
under gangrenous
cover. Street
lamps glow
ochre. Never-Never
gonna Land
Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Venice, 2003. Source: magnumphotos.com
On a major thoroughfare between a porn theatre and a filling station, it was just past the central cemetery and the bridge over the railway lines. A young communist lived in the room across from yours. He worked in a hotel. You had no job and no prospects but, for the moment, didn’t care. You’d sit together at the brittle table in the kitchen, all dark browns and orange, smoking, and listening to cassettes of sixties pop tunes, with small cups of coffee, now and again a beer. You had a couple of books and some traveler’s checks. Day after day you’d wander the sunburnt city, surprised, over and over again, at how often you got lost.
Nun raising Ra, from Book of the Dead of Anhai, BC 1050. Source: Wikipedia
A metaphor for darkness
A people seized the sun, somewhere
in Africa. They sprinkle it into the sea
& there, let it simmer into ordinary sizzles,
coiled with bones of broken men;
burnt men who, at first, refused to be boiled.
The sweat & the green tears of cuffed women,
at dawn, rise & roar into different images
not known to the purple sky above. It becomes
Niger & Nile. So it seems: the sun that left never left.
Riley Montana by Chris Colls, W Magazine. Source: wmagazine.com
riley montana slaps the runway
behind the scene it is 30°C
the same temperature a body doesn’t need
to start decomposing—
the body sashays away in a blue blazer
catwalks to a stop in a dirndl
hundred irises of a palazzo
& when the body stops it stops only
to let the world have a view of itself through the bow-bridge of legs
тнє ѕυℓтαη'ѕ ѕєαℓ 