Poetry
Not Quite Symmetry
Broke, I’d like to borrow your lower half,
Wear it for a day, make some coins. I’d
Love to enter you, snug, but not through
The usual channel. You can invade me,
Feel my convexity, as I’m ventilated
By your absence, there, in the crotch.
My eyes shaded by your eyelids, I’ll
Conform to your nose’s architecture,
Breathe this life though your nostrils.
Contributor
Linh DinhLINH DINH is the author of a collection of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000), and three chapbooks of poems. He is the editor and translator of Three Vietnamese Poets.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Julia Bland: The Half That Ties, the Half that Breaks
By Claire VoonNOV 2019 | ArtSeen
An unshakable sense of magic pervades almost all of Julia Bland’s laboriously fabricated fiber works in her first solo show at Andrew Rafacz gallery. Cut, stitched, painted, and burned canvases joined with hand-woven textiles hang like tapestries that thrum with entrancing geometric configurations. Even the exhibition’s measured title, The Half That Ties, the Half that Breaks, evokes an incantation—a sort of ritual poem seeking to resolve seemingly contrary forces.
Plas Ayiti (Neon Project)
By Milla JungFEB 2021 | Critics Page
Plas Ayiti consists of a bright installation in neon, measuring four and a half by one meters atop the building Nossa Senhora da Luz (Our Lady of Light). At night time, it featured the term Plas Ayiti, which in Haitian Creole means “Haitian Place,” giving visibility to the name that Haitian immigrant refugees used to refer to the plaza where they met as a community.
Julie Mehretu: about the space of half an hour
By William CorwinDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
In this new body of work—actually three different sets of paintings and etchings—Julie Mehretu is inscribing marks from a series of hands: her own, the fingerprints of digital interventions, and even the hand of the Almighty (at least by implication), on a series of roiled and undulating backgrounds.
Scholastique Mukasonga’s Igifu
By John DominiDEC 20-JAN 21 | Books
Over the last decade and a half, Scholastique Mukasonga has resurrected an entire lost culture. Though she was nearly 50 when her first book appeared, and writing in French, her third or fourth language—depending how you count the indigenous tongues of Rwanda—her output amounts to a small but essential library memorializing the Tutsi.
