Poetry & Fiction

Last Hour of Every Angel

by

I

…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.

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Like the Night

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He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.

Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.

Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.

“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.

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X Factor

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The author emailed this response to Leila Zalokar’s December 1 post, “Planet X,” under the heading, “Awesome.”

Starts with a bang! [couldn’t help myself]

And right off the bat, I can’t think of a word, but that melancholy, ironic, hopefulness(?)

…still, the desire to fuck / morning cigarettes…

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Triplicate (Poems On Domination & Consequences)

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Fate

If the Fates come to take
those I love, bear witness to this —
………………………..they will not be victims
………………………..of what the ignorant, or,
………………………..perhaps, the grieving,
………………………..call terror.
……………….
Rockets fly into neighbors’ homes —
………………………..tonight? Tomorrow?
……………………….My own home?

If the Fates come for those I love,
I will not wrap them in white sheets,
lay them at the door of the man
who forced this war. He will not see us.

And if the Fates come for me, well,
there is no wrong in dying. But
bear witness, bear witness to this —
……………………………………I am not killed
……………………………………by a foreign hand.
……………….

Israel. Gaza. May 2021.

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To Be A Giraffe

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1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates,
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.

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Planet X

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..Still, there’s the desire to fuck.

..There’s morning cigarettes.

..There’s the sun, post-orgasmic, after the death of all superstructures and erections. The shade cum sliding down her thigh earth night secret smile sleep dark no dream

..Pearls and scars

..A few more good poems to read, fewer still to write.

..The collapse of empires, master races, meta narratives, ethical sadomasochisms, bourgeois psychology, teleology of hope.

..There’s no need to rebuild anything.

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Betrayal

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When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.

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Abyss (whatever the fuck that is…)

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Intifada

“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”

..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…

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Failing Upward (Two Poems)

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Trying To Think About Anything Other Than Israel

Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.

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