by Safi Alsebai
At the Checkpoint That Has Not Evaporated
Let me force a bribe into your fist
here, where you and I are from, so where
you say that now for once
the guards are as son as your son they call you
Father with the
same kalashnikovs as before
the same beards the same Fathers
But they refuse the bribe since there is nothing
left to buy with that amount of cash
For its part in the heaving pearlescence of world-making
the money ravage
replaces hallucination with sabotage or uh,
the slipperiness of the real with
slippery people’s realism
Invertebrate Song
Princely, seated between shifts and tensing
silky necks through chewed and spit-soaked
collars; weeks since anyone has sung a number
or kissed anyone’s lips or inner wrists,
the softest most perfumed parts of a man
Stay in your tower, sky-grown beloved
with your 12-tone and quarter-tone floggers,
far from the nostalgia here on the ground,
from weekdays and delegations, baby,
although your distance winds and unwinds me
Courtier: “I licked my own wound this week”
Another: “I licked mine own with two tongues,
having split my tongue in two to become
a moderate,” he rebutted in boast
“All embodiment is wounded, which I
hate!” decides the muscle queen, a stoic
“So why not let’s stay inside and pray to
immediacy, non-mediation?”
My translation of this demand goes like:
Give up the exercise of wanting, to
launder happiness at the very end.
****
Safi Alsebai a writer from Arkansas. His work has appeared in, among other venues, ballast, DIALOGIST, MIDCULT* and Vers Lit Mag, with poetry forthcoming in the Journal for Medical Humanities. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an internal medicine resident.