Explore Poems: Subjects

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Вдавати що ти картопля
ховатися в мішок
дивитися на світ крізь дірочку
доки тебе несуть із город…

I am pleased I will soon die and with me the pressing need to make a terrible, terribly poignant film…

The dream came weeks after I visited The Beautiful Captive, a solo exhibition by an Alexandrian artist. In an installation exploring enactments of domesticity, two goldfish were meant to be floating mindlessly around a glass bowl but upon looking closely, I noticed one of them had stopped moving. When I inquired, I was told the fish had died unexpectedly that morning, and that the assistant curator was on her way to the gallery with a replacement. Can I make you some tea while the new fish gets here?A red velvet curtain hung inches above a fireplace with a beige marble mantel, a vase carrying two birds of paradise crowning one side, emptiness the other.In the hearth not fire, but a belly of glass.At his talk that evening, the artist did mention Magritte, but did not say the looping goldfish were stand-ins for fire. I might have read that later, in the curatorial statement.In an old photograph (Geneva, c. 1993?) not one but two bees are trapped in a glass cup turned upside down—how did my father manage that? It was a game we played after we ate, as the light packed its things. When I could no longer see their honey stripes, or my mother’s orange lips, I knew it was night.diary excerpts [weeks preceding dream]No noteworthy dreams.No punctuation.Notes for my obituary: Survived by dust. No cats. Green milk. She always unlocked the door with the wrong key first. Kept her skin on a hanger as she slept. She was two women. One bird of paradise. One ran out.Not again—the dream of wearing glass gloves I can’t take off. Nails painted red. Like flame in ice.Now I cannot clean the house.

I pestle sea rice

on the shore, mix with

shipwreck’s pitch.       Black damper, sun-baked.

This fickle…

Zora Neal Hurston spent time
in the low country
interviewing & filming
kids on corners & folk at work,
but…

Handcuffed in daylight walking through air
today the subject imagined a near future
where other subjects…

The country with the face of its mother
tattooed across its chest searched
for connection like the coiler…

You are pursuing a feeling like the dust
In the voice of Bob Kaufman plus the mud
Of the most fertile…

Акордеоне тролейбуса
твої міхи повні
нашого мовчання
що веземо з дому на роботу
з роботи додому

Мо…

Один російський громадянин
вийшов на вулицю
з плакатом война
російські міліціонери
запакували його в автозак

Інші росіяни
уважно спостерігали за цим
і знімали все на телефони

Одна російська громадянка
вийшла на вулицю
з плакатом мир
російські міліціонери
запакували її в автозак

Інші росіяни
почали ставати в чергу до автозака
з плакатами й без

Один російський солдат
почав читати роман
одного російського бороданя
далі обкладинки не пішов
бо й так усе ясно
читати між рядків
його навчили ще в школі

It’s easy to conflate whiteness with having an easy life, so you sometimes mistake the tall white man…

Старі велосипеди вперто приносять
палки в колесах своїм господарям
досі тягнуть усе до рота
як малюки щ…

Look at a painting of sky. Look 
a long time and notice one thing.
How someone’s wet eye stares back
like…

The cloud casts a shadow on the mountain. 
A sentence comes like code, long after
the image, which is …

Monday and it starts out mobile
Monday you can picture “health”
the picture is a stucco villa
shining…

so we commissioned a document
about sustenance and the city’s pores
metaphors of food and skin
for …

You track the proliferation of white male/Asian female couples on the street, in your friend groups,…

The tall white man joins a white affinity group with his cousins, even the one who questioned the group…

A tall white man beside you on a hike, a tall white man eating ice cream beside you, the white man who…