ODE TO HIPPOCRATES Who’s Hippocrates, I know, in Crete or someplace else – calling out to the Sirens, the Sea’s own and asking you for healing ways, the mind or spirit’s, not the body’s own. Oh, the body, and […]
Categories
Poetry
Snow Is Falling Snow is falling. The earth turns white. Its new skin is as smooth as silk. The sun hides behind a veil. I stay confined inside my shelter while the cedars run between the houses and collect […]
Summernote V Call her goddess of heath and yellow gorse. Tell her you have left the moon unlit. Snuggled into its folds. Swamp-fed forest creeks. Grafted to fen carr, sedge grasses. Dwarf blackberries. See if she believes you. […]
Cheeky Mathematics He and she fuse their cells with the sticky glue of their warm juices Two cells become one which then divides and multiplies until one plus one adds up to ten perfect little toes Baby trades […]
1. Circumstance and sorrow had aged me by the time I found my way into the fire-blighted wood scorched by flames rising up from an earth ravaged by explorations for oil, its water table plundered relentlessly by impulses […]
I am nobody else’s version of who I am You cannot set your mind based on my looks alone There is no language that defines me Do not box me in Because I am my own I choose not to be enslaved […]
We are still here Aimé, us the niggers of the north An otherness-nothingness imprisoned in our minds by our colour I have heard of white writers who claim to be bush niggers they live outside the high prison […]
Seven Mountains For my maternal grandmother That moment when you see spring on your windowsill you have lost your sister, ceramic pot yellow daffodils, nodding buds. Wilted petals. Ruffled trumpet. Shriveled and fading that moment when news […]
sometimes I dream that speaking Hausa would make me feel better
In the rich dread of my predecessors.
No women here. No women at all.
Tata worked as a waitress at her family's restaurant by the beach.
And the ducks give up their dabbling at the lily patch
loops of razor wire fences
Man on a Rocking Chair in San Juan In San Juan I found a man rocking on his balcony, the floors creaking, the glaze in the gaze, a daffodil stem hanging from his lips. I asked him was he […]
You will be the midwife To whatever little I have, You will be the midwife To what little miseries I cherish You will be the mast To my lost catamaran You will be the frozen froth of […]
I shot myself But I can’t seem to recall how it felt
Harsh, but stay with me.
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Abby Lippman (1939-2017). “As we were preparing to go on-line with this issue, we were hit with an emotional sledgehammer. Abby Lippman – a frequent contributor to Serai, a dear […]
After Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Red on Red), 1969 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Peace Pavilion
Musée Rodin, 1972 I saw this body I am sure of it. Flesh and bronze. In one long stare, In fixated, circular study, In love with this thoracic cage, Vertical breakline, rack Of ribs, sinews strong, Tying life and […]
Cayo Santa Maria (Written in Cayo Santa Maria, Cuba in February 2017, right after meditation on the beach) Crashing wave reaching high up on to the beach, then disappearing like a dream, like some understanding, into silent sand (a […]
Chronic Fatigue System Too tired to exercise (who gets mono in their 50s?), endorphins droop and symptoms of menopause return, drench night’s sheets. And the bones, breaking down, what that other poet said, ‘the leaking’ or ‘letting in of […]
Peuple dilué investigates the psychology of bodies untethered to borders and regions. Originally inspired by the Roma population of Sutka, Macedonia, this on-going series explores the idea of a people versus a nation and transient identities.
Early Work History: Sold sugary fruit-flavored shaved ice piraguas on busy South Bronx streets for chump change. Opened laundromat mornings to sweep mop roll down lock steely cocoon face at night. Loaded outdoor lumberyard truck with plywood sheet-rock […]
It feels like a story at the right moment
The Stone told The Sculptor what it wanted to be.
Seule et honteuse dans mon lit
Can I look down and see my ageing, knuckled hands...
After the storm, turned my back on my lover till he sighed and left.
