Flame
2 Minutes Read Time
Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Marei’s stunningly vivid poem captures the raw enormity of grief through a proliferation of ephemeral images, each flickering and shifting before us like the mesmerist dance of flame. It’s a poem readers will return to, each time sensing something new in the seen.
Listen to Anaya Marei read the poem:
Note: The full text of the poem follows the image below.
Flame
Flame
Ballooning into a sky that now forgets
To be anything but gray. All the red that wants to be the dark. Give me another
Screen. Give me another lens
Through which to see this falling apart. A flag to imagine
My country onto. We can’t make out the running through the haze. If I cut the remembering
In half, there is almost a normal to pretend
My way into. All of this enveloping something that used to be skeleton but now has broken
Beyond that: art-gallery white. In another country, it is called cream
Not teeth. A map—still
A nameless face can’t make out the borders
My bones came from. Passed down to me: this ache of copper, this pleading of smoke. A world
Where I can’t tell the difference. Tell me whether I can call this inheritance—
This is another way of saying mountains can be passed down in bloodlines
So if I can’t see you in my face, I see you when I shred my knees into crimson pulp. Pomegranate
Seeds just another violence. Come back
To the seen. Here: a figure in blue, frozen midstep, foot turned toward blaze
From the back, he is face
Less: one moment a boy, the next a man
I blink him gone. On the screen, three take his place, so far in the background
Their faces are just blank grief
