Untitled by Selma Deera, from Letters From Medea

“but there is no god listening to them
because they broke the windows
and god is focusing on the repairs”

“Letters to Kafka” by Salma Deera, from Letters From Medea

At 2AM, a ghost wanders around Prague and finds
itself in the room of Franz Kafka.
‘Where have you been, Kafka?’ it asks.
‘Why have you been so lonely?’
‘I have metamorphosed into a monster.’ Kafka mumbles.
‘What is a monster?’ the ghost asks.
‘A monster is a thing that loves everything too much.
A monster is what happens when a person is starved
and then fed the world.’
Here is Kafka, full of wisdom and melancholy.
Here is Kafka, a brilliant troubled moon-eyed boy who carries
around his wretchedness like a backpack full of
provisions and finds himself trapped on a mountain
and isn’t sure where he should kill himself.
It’s his sadness he really wants to kill.
(I want to kill my sadness too, Kafka. I want to drown it)
What Kafka doesn’t know is that his hands have held
a thousand people long after he left.
Their eyes only open when they are with him.
At 2am in Prague, circa 1918, Kafka wakes up, coughing.
Tuberculosis has ravaged this boy from the inside out,
he tries to cough out his loneliness.
He will be coughing on loneliness for the rest of his life.

“A Lesson In Contrast” by Salma Deera, from Letters From Medea

on a trip to the drugstore, a young girl’s eyes
scan the shelves like a world war 2 sniper.
she is searching for the right equipment to storm
normandy and gut it like a watermelon.
except it is herself she is storming. it is herself she is gutting.
here is a question—what kind of soldier invades themselves?
a girl does.
at bootcamp, that is all she has been taught.
remove those hairs. remove that mole, remove that beaming self-confidence. you won’t need it in a world like this.
but do not worry. you won’t have to do everything yourself.
men will remove your innocence for you.
so she goes to the drugstore to find what she can.
today, she is trying to make her body lighter–
her skin lighter, too.
but i want to ask her, what is wrong with being dark and heavy
with your feet firmly on soil?
tell me, i say to her.
how many people will be able to blend in
with the dark deep night like you can?
tell me, i say.
after you erase yourself, how many people will ever be as heavy with loss as you are?

“The curse of Medea” by Salma Deera, from Letters From Medea

My curse is that i fall in love with
men who believe in Gods but not in me.
Who will call their love Titanic while
intending to sink anyone who
tries to touch it.

from “The Dark and the Fair” by Stanley Kunitz

“We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong

Less to what flatters us than to what scars.”

 

Affirmation by Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

Alex Lemon, from “Swallowing the Scalpel,” Mosquito: Poems

These pills are a lover sneering motherfucker.

Anne Carson, Dictionary Excerpts in “Nox”

Omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat : the whole pointless night seeps out of the heart.

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

Whatever Happened to Al Lee? by Charles Wright

What happened is what happens to all of us: we walked
On the earth, we threw a couple of handfuls of dirt
Into the air, and when it came down it covered us.