Kazim AliHorizon
It's unbearable what you remember, numb in a storm wanting the answer. There's a boat that loves to drink. You love to be tricked or called names. Pray you quicksilver rush to me quickly make me mad, unfasten me from shore. At its freezing point wind shatters. Were you faking it or really dying. The night has a name the storm is ashamed of. Send me to the earth's end, I have never seen it.
Four O'clockAn old man with a bag of chocolates, lost on the sidewalk, on his way home from the corner store. He won't be missed until his granddaughter arrives home from school at four o'clock to an empty house. A mouthful of chocolates, the recitation of a chapter: tangible and intangible ways of saying: God or come home. Being borne up over elms and houses by waves of voices reciting saffron chapters written into the streets and sky. Written onto the sheet that years later will be wrapped around his forehead, folded over his mouth. Illusion is the sheet and the thing lying beneath it. Gone the streets he knows, unwritten the map of how to find him. Dizzy with all the changing directions. It's a minute before four. Where did I come from? Which way will I be borne?
VaseHe wrote to you once, night's cold I, a midnight enameled vase. He wrote to you twice, sun-yellow dusk, storm-broken branches, snow-blue shelf in the sky. He wrote to you three times, and the nothing inside flew up, a listless prisoner, tethered, a spy.
Kazim Ali is the author of The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, and Quinn's Passage, named by Chronogram magazine as one of The Best Books of 2005. His new book of poetry, The Fortieth Day, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2008. Kazim is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University, teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program, and is the publisher of Nightboat Books.
