My long poem barked like a dogWore an orange madras headdressRefused to change the light bulb. My long poemWould not weep. Lilies begone, sweep your wiltedBirthday selves like balloons dragging the lakeFor a child. Sweep your pitiful blue angelsBack into their chimney.The foundation has soot like satin. My unfooting Begins thus. Scars begin movingOf their …
To fully experience this visual poem in its original form, enlarge the image below the text. Text: Girl names soften the tongue, a delicate unfolding, Ghalam, painted with a pen, Lucine, moon.The boy names, Kevork, Sevag, fire from throat, guttural consonants.On the first page, my grandfather’s name, Arakel, to send forth.At seven, he hunger-marched the …
Listen to GC Waldrep read the poem: Haruspexy at field’s edge.The unwritten soulstitches it into the fringeof its garment,I mean the image of it.We are told nothing, really.It’s a worldsweeping the bridefrom the hospital tiles.A snowstorm’s on its way.The field, vs.the known planets& the hospitals they succor.At the marginsof the statutory seasonof ancestral suffering,a gun …
In Chengdu, Sichuan provincenear the top of a red-roofed apartment buildingwhere the elevators are broken far too oftenmy grandmother and grandfather spend their days in the pandemic on the couchtheir arms around one another, watching the dramas on TV.Every year, every picture I seeevery video call on WeChatthey are a little grayera little more stooped.There …
Once we said light came into us,penetrant and hallowing, a feeling like standingon the sixty-fifth floor of a skyscraperbuilt from solid glass. But now it lingers outsideand favors the edges, limning car fendersand discarded corn-chip bags, valuing it allthe same. Once we said In sorrow, said Sweatof thy brow. My father, in his pulpit, said,May …
Alison’s Halo on the aux, or would you rather someBlack Tape for a Blue Girl? Something upbeat? I’ve been lovingCaroline Polachek lately. I’m a bit of a poseur; wrote a poem after her mostDanced-to song, “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” even though I toldEvery friend I couldn’t get into her discography, no matter how …
Always, since childhood, I had aBeautiful dick, and a beautiful ass. I was told so ICould know. After knowing, I learned heart from a tape ofDavid Bowie, and Life on Mars? turned me off fromEvery film I watched afterward, even the ones with all-but-nameFaggots, like Withnail and I, or The Matrix, or,God forbid, Fight Club, …
Listen to Shara McCallum read “At the Sea”: The Tragedy, Pablo Picasso (1903) The tragedy remains unspoken.Yet we can see it in the adults’hunched shoulders, their armswrapping tightly their torsos. A trio,this man, woman, and child standbarefoot on the sand, white-foamedwaves approaching their feet.The woman holds herself apart,and I make of them a family,attach to …
from The Antigone Sonnets I’m thinking again of pink walls in Calcuttafrom my cheap little apartment in Houstonthat I love. I love it. A necessary repetition.Against the pink walls and inside themand held by them—twice—one long winter,a man I used to love. I’ve been thinkingabout him. Walls holding him. Sort of likeafter the second stasimon …
from The Antigone Sonnets I asked for an ending and was given two.One in bed and the other at the door, turning.Antigone begins with a twofold blow and endswith a cross-hilted sword, half its length lodgedin a body, and a knife clean with blood at an altar.The consequence of refusing the dead a burialand sentencing …