After “Mountain Stream,” by John Singer Sargent (1914)   The spring after my brother admitted he was an addict, we spent a week at the Laurel River, the rush of snow- melt to wash clean our winter wants, our fresh guilt. One morning I discovered him gone, the rented cabin empty except for the shadow of panic tailing me like a loyal dog. I stumbled down to the river, the high water roaring loud as a bad engine—and there he was, crouched like Sargent’s anonymous bather, naked & thrilled by cold, a streak of flesh in the dark stones. Too close to the great tumble of white water, his b ..read more

The Charles jumps its walls and floods the city while we’re out feeding strays. We try to run but can’t escape it. I tell you again that I’m afraid of The Blob. This time you don’t find it charming. You cut open my thigh each evening to practice stitching it back together. Use a lighter to burn the tip of the needle and the fishing wire I have in the apartment for suturing. I can’t remember the last time I cast a rod with any intention. There is worn furniture, conversation about the melting glacial shelf, and one of us, inevitably panics because we are hairless and entangled and we can’t tel ..read more

In Poetry Double Features, poet, critic, and editor Summer Farah moves away from the capitalistic language of “comparative titles” and instead towards the indulgence possible in considering two poetry collections that complement each other. The books paired here are not necessarily similar, but Farah asks: what language, pleasure, or wonder might be uncovered when they are read together? Poetry Double Features is in praise of the beautiful and unruly process of reading, synthesizing, and parsing out connective threads.  This month, Farah considers How Do I Look? by Sennah Yee an ..read more

Prayer shawls, paper flowers, a purple rosary. We built an altar on the hospital room table. Butterflied like a fish, she died and did not die, rose again each time metal unfolded her flesh. I slept in fits as she became a deity. As doctors transformed her. In a dream, I saw her vivisected and hovering above the plastic-railed bed. Her heart a pulsing stone of gold. Her body wreathed in living muscles cut free, red water serpents writhing around her alabaster bones. I cannot remember what I asked when I prayed to her. It must have been for a heart. When I woke, it was time to drain fluid ..read more

  Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance. / After such a revelation, the poem is about race, the story is about the gun, the dance is about the body of the dancer — it is no longer considered a dance at all and is subject to regulation.” —Monica Youn, From From  “I want to put that dancer back into the privacy of history. But he’s got his own future. He’s out there now, working on the railroad.” —Paisley Rekdal, West: A Translation “In the researching of [The West Coast’s] history, it was clear that at least t ..read more

I’m attempting the opposite of a heist here— I’m becoming a confessional poet whose only confession is I keep getting nervous some wild animal is about to see me naked. It’s the time of year I chase the light around, when the season forces its color palette on me. It’s the time of year I sea monster in the bath and say dramatic things like half decade, and in my dreams last night, you were jealous I spoke the language (I don’t) you were jealous of all the cool bisexuals’ plastic flower alchemy. The time of year when I’ll blow out the candles I’ll blow on an eyelash I’ll hold you at needlepoint ..read more

In Korean we do not say you get older we say you eat age get plush with years my grandmother says because she has eaten so much age she forgets the stash of pins coins beanie babies she had saved for future riches the hair serum samples we were all to use so the age we have eaten won’t show up on our heads so much I have also forgotten how to bleed and pray on bended knee so she cries but it’s just the age I’ve eaten I say kept poorly and badly metabolized the next will nourish me better I say yes the next will fill me up. The post Collecting, yes, collecting ..read more

  “[T]he organic and arborescent notion of a place—roots and branches—as well as the naturalized identity of a place and a people cannot be sustained against the backdrop of immigrant stories. From this perspective, the story of immigrants is not peripheral to the history of the Middle East; rather, it is an integral part of that social, cultural, and economic matrix.” —Akram Fouad Khater, Becoming “Syrian” in America “‘No one knows what goes on in the mind of the Divine. Perhaps He doesn’t care. Perhaps He is not angry. On a night such as this you feel you are able to rise up to the sky ..read more

The lumbering bear swung its head of hesitation down an industrial street. Brown bats dropped onto river grass; the terror of a long fall. The cherry spit out its pit. A spider crawled the wall, tasting the brick with its forelegs. If we keep silent, the stones will cry out. The post Fable appeared first on Palette Poetry ..read more

link to pdf The post Footnotes to Being Nigerian and an Arrow at full draw appeared first on Palette Poetry ..read more