Poetry

Poetry is generously sponsored by the Guston Fund, in memory of Philip Guston and his friendship with the poets.

We Do Not Resemble This World

By Dima Mahmod, Mohamed Elsawi Hassan, and Jennifer Jean

We do not resemble this world—
the armored vehicle that lurks, washes us before we undress,
this complacency means little as we pierce the world’s eye with a needle,
the world that jumps like a joyful clown
aiming its nuclear heads and napalm fatally
while corruption gallivants in its guts without doubt or hesitation.
What would happen if we swapped our halves, attempting confrontation,
and said that butter is half of society,
and with a mural brush painted our upper halves green to support environmentalists,
and I replaced my legs with lamp posts to know the plight of the betrayed,
while your legs become a hammer in the hand of an apprentice?
What would happen if we said: Nothing outside the script!
Nothing inside it either!
The egg is still an egg,
and poets are foolish brokers between reality and art.
Should I lend you my bra now in the name of equality,
take a photo with your pipe as unjustified nostalgia for a bourgeois ritual?
Between “Trotsky” and “Lenin” we could reverse the sickles upwards, splash them with blue
in a surreal effort to pull the sky down,
to explore the metaphysics of the next twenty years,
and strategies to face wars, labor strikes, and bear flu.
Organize carnivals for relief, elections, and attracting investors from Tibet.
When your cell phone rang as you slaughtered two white pigeons,
I did not mean to prevent your hands from being stained with blood.
I was just going to say:
It is not only contradictions that disturb the world’s order,
It’s you and me too…
Despite us being as similar as the blades of scissors!

Butterly at the Tang

By Forrest Gander

Butterly at the Tang

—for Kathy Butterly

They’re so alluring, he said. So alluring, she answered, they unsettle me.
Like volumes of stained glass sagging in the rose window of a Gothic church.

Or an augury, she said. I find myself not taking them in as objects so much
as experiencing their infectious emotional fillip. And our complicity, he added.

Maybe like some freaky collision between funk wit and knock-out elegance?
No, he thought, like a wrestling match between desire and extinction.

It’s as though their intelligence, she said, is a secrecy rather than a narrative.
Those outer folds give life to the shape. But inside each sculpture,

There’s space for imagination, for a darkness
plunging into dimensions uncontained by the form.

Magisterial ruins, he said. How else would you describe them?
I was thinking of the Hanunóo who live in an island rainforest

but have just four words for color: wet, dry, light, and dark, a spectrum
they refine with impressions of strength or weakness.

Is there a word for something small in scale, but enormous in presence?
He was trying to remember. You mean like fragments from Sappho?

It’s as though she kneads decoration with distortion and out pops magnitude.
That’s the word, he said.

Yes, she answered, but the magnitude isn’t masculine, it’s not Serra.
Doesn’t it function more as an invitation to intimacy? Half-birthed, collapsing,

regenerating, the vases are queenly, tempered with self-possession and control
at the same time they’re vulnerable, wounded, buckling in on themselves.

This one, for instance, she pointed to Sagittarius A. What do we see
from right here? Tiny beads at the neckline of a collar which rests

on two rounded protrusions uncoupled by a cleft
suggesting buttocks. Yet from any other angle, no such suggestion occurs.

Righto, he said. The encounters she offers up aren’t ever enclosed in one perspective.
He said, Homer calls this color Tyrian purple. But check out her glaze list:

Stardust matte, heat wave, crystal orange, camellia pink, cognac, matador
red, froth lava lavender, Scandia blue, lime parfait, Castilian avocado.

He said, I hear she fires and fires again, judging the weight of one glaze
against another. To find out how, cheek to cheek, the colors tango. It’s all

juxtaposition, isn’t it, a grammar of textures, translucencies, opacities, the copper
generating blue and blue-green, interacting with lead in a flux

that lowers the melting point, and cadmium boosting those vibrant reds.
Instead of reinforcing line, she countered, her colors set their own boundaries.

And there’s no final effect, really. It’s ongoing. The feelings they emanate
keep lugging along dozens of lambent, allusive meanings.

What I never noticed before, mused a man standing alone in a baggy suit,
is how in the company of other colors, the personality of a color changes.

Looks like ice cream, said a boy. His sister: You think everything looks like ice cream.

two poems

By Rick Barot

Triptych

1.

It is after midnight and I walk to the high school soccer field to find
a dark dark enough to look up at the full moon, risen now.  There is
a man in my mind so far away he is like  another  moon, but left out
of the sky. I hum the song  about two people  yawning and swaying
in the empty subway car. I hum  the  other  song,  the man’s wistful
growl  making an  aesthetic  out of  not doing well. The sky is black
with clarity,  as in a  haiku.  My feet in the summer grass.

 

2.

If  I  live  another   hundred   years,  would  I  see   in   your   children’s
children  the  traces  of  what  is  before  me  now?  The  way  you turn
over each quarter to see the state that is represented there. The way
the air  around  you  smells  of  peppermint  and sweat.  The way you
turn  words   toward   their   droll   meanings,   throwing   the    picnic
blanket at the  trunk  of  the  tree  after  I tell you to throw it into the
trunk of the car. The way weariness glazes your  face  after  you have
spoken too much or others have spoken too  much.  The  way you  lie
down anyplace, on the  airport  floor  or  on  the  park  bench, to  shut
your eyes, tender as a figure secreted in a sonnet. The way  you  sing
with   a   nervous   beauty,  the   way   you   walk. A  hundred  years, a
thousand: the future as suffused with you as the present. 

 

3.

The critic is right: in each of the famous sonnets  there are in fact two
poems.  There  is  the  poem  you  read,  its  characters  and  emotions
clear  as   on   a   stage.   And    then   there   is   the   poem  you  slowly
apprehend, materializing like  a  haze  on  the  page,  like  a phantom,
outraged and keening. The figure on the  stage  keeps  exclaiming  its
love  for   the   beloved,  but  the  phantom  at  the  margin  knows  the
beloved  is   false,   that   the   beloved   is  always   false.  This  is  each
sonnet’s philosophy of love. And this, too, is  love  as  I  know  it.

Thin Place Visit

By Ishion Hutchinson

Before the amputation 
I went to see him, living
alone in that nut-brown
English air. Everything
stale within view. Not
what I had imagined
from his shanty bushed
over the sea for twenty
odd years, lost in wild
daylight. Rushing one
flight up the council flat
my crabbed hand letters
were sent, I opened the door
to him in his wheelchair.
The foot to go jutted out
like a lance, his dark eyes
straggled against mine
then softened. I can’t
recall them for myself
but I’m told I have his eyes.
Bees, I thought, as he
wheeled into the living
room, his eyes looked
like bees, catching some
of what he said streaming
from the seemingly endless,
seemingly indifferent light
frittering through the blinds.
All painfully bachelor,
florid in ways I recognised.
On the train from London
to Milton Keynes I kept
wondering, as his letters
promised, what if he had
taken me up to England,
like my letters pleaded,
then I’d have understood
why concrete cows grazing
in roundabouts looked up
so expectantly at me with
the tight strung silence
that was England. I passed
flattened shades, greys
supersaturated into the beige,
putty history my father sunk
into over years. That was England.
Turning he made another
admission I couldn’t quite
follow, perhaps about
my life. The midafternoon
glare lengthened between
us into a thin place the next
word would’ve shattered.
I stared at his foot propped
on a cushion, weaponlike,
the loneliness of his life shone,
however foolish and lent him
dignity when I entered. His eyes,
as if just noticing, contracted
to inflamed coral at what
was before him, thunder
locked, trumpet tree quiet,
his beast tall reflection
looking down for a future,
seeing only wasted kerosene
nights writing to him here,
this elsewhere England,
the address recited, stored
in wood beams. He moved
forward and it touched me.
Light, toughened plastic,
hollow. I touched it back.
Three toes gone to gangrene.
Sole full of cracks and nail holes.
A deep dead dent in the instep
I pressed my thumb against
and felt the plyboards stuffed
with newspaper of his sea
shanty, left to ruin after he went
away. There I fidgeted weekend,
forcing shadows to scutter
up into a man, his head coiled
heavy with seahorses on
his shoulders that I rode
into the sea. He dissolved,
leaving water trembling
through my fingertips,
serrating the air as he shrunk
behind the peninsula he couldn’t
return to nor now stand to face
what he can’t run away from.

The Book of Beetles

By The Friend

The Book of Beetles

I wasn’t sure the death beetle existed.
But then it fluttered into my life.
It perched itself on little chains
between insanity and love.
A space I assumed native to the death beetle.
For years it made my ribs its home.
Though the death beetle can only be the harbinger
of one thing. A mistake I realized
a decade later. Bodega shoppers behave
like tourists. They emerge from nowhere
except the foreign time of childhood.
Where people pumped gas for a nickel.
Then the death beetle entered.
With whirl and whoosh, the delicate
screech of a dial-up modem.
My parents redid their mortgage more
times than they ever kissed in public.
At 15, I swore to never ride a rollercoaster
but then I had a crush. And lo,
the death beetle arrived through high school
leading me to conquer all my fears
and copulate into a simple sock.
On summer nights the Gospels would hum
into my goat-like ears through the
lonely valleys of shit. An adult,
I went to shop for vintage clothes
and pay for movie tickets on a credit card.
It was near a park fountain in the city
some spring eve the death beetle returned.
As if a letter borne from a vision.
It took the shape of a favorite person.
The inscrutable clutch of its jaws both
flimsy cheap and altogether swift.
But the gift of its silent precision
was not unlike a tiny velvet box.
Inflict pain; avoid suffering. Become
passion. I was gutted like a silver fish.
I had not been sick for many years.
Nor confused myself for a fabled thing.
I squandered no big resistance.
I took to naked nimble music and
did not bother with the usefulness
of obdurate regret. I worked my
ankles; swore against compromise.
Death’s commonplace is suburbia.
But the death beetle is keen to survive
from time to time, thriving how it can
on noiseless soundless wings.
Setting failures aside, I named
betrayals after friends, forgetting
whom to blame and whom not to.
Like a large board of basic wood,
I sandwiched up along the street.
Sometimes stood on curbs waiting
for a turn or sign to move again.
And looking through certain books,
bored to death on certain afternoons,
my life resumed its ordinary shape
in the illness of numbers and letters
among desperate lost positions.
I nursed grief. I blew my life up
once or twice, unsure which was
accidental. My apartment is littered
with dirty clothes and feels
like it belongs to someone else.
I want for nothing and seek it.
But without the death beetle squarely
in view I find myself misused.
When I was twelve my father spelled
Yugoslavia with his eyes closed correctly
and I remember crying out in awe.

from Last Stops of the Night Journey

By Milo De Angelis, Patrizio Ceccagnoli, and Susan Stewart

GUERRA DI TRINCEA
TRENCH WARFARE

Questa morte è un’officina
ci lavoro da anni e anni
conosco i pezzi buoni e quelli deboli,
i giorni propizi, la virtù
di applicarsi minuto per minuto e quella
di sostare, sostare e attendere
una soluzione nuova per il guasto.
Vieni, amico mio, ti faccio vedere,
ti racconto.

 

 

 

This death is a repair shop
I’ve been working here for years and years
and know the solid parts and the shoddy ones,
the lucky days, the merits
of tinkering, minute by minute, and those
of pausing, pausing and waiting
for a new fix after the breakdown.
Come here, my friend, I’ll show you,
I’ll tell you about it.

 

 

 

Tutto cominciò in una cameretta
con i regali e le candeline
che in un soffio spensero mio padre
fermo nella sua giacca per sempre
e un cerchio di puro niente mi assalì
in un solo attimo franò sul tavolo
e mi mostrò cento di questi giorni.

 

 

 

It all began in a little bedroom
with presents and candles
that, in one breath, extinguished my father
standing still forever in his blazer
and a circle of pure nothingness assailed me
as all at once he collapsed on the table
in a heap of happy returns.

 

 

 

.........................................................
.........................................................
..................nel 1967, dopo una lunga guerra
di trincea, dopo una guerra di metri
guadagnati e persi, iniziai
una trattativa con la morte.

 

 

 

......................................................... 
.........................................................
..................in 1967, after a long war in
the trenches, after a war of meters
gained and lost, I began
a negotiation with death.

 

 

 

Iniziai dunque a trattare, sì, a trattare
ma lei recalcitrava, negava la firma,
si dava per dispersa e riappariva sul più bello
nella vela di una carezza o nella voce
che indicava lassù un’orsa favolosa
era lei con un sapore di mandorle bruciate
iniettava nell’alba il suo buio primitivo.

 

 

 

I began, then, to negotiate, yes, to negotiate
but she was stubborn, refusing to sign,
she pretended to have gone missing then showed up
in the swell of a sail of a caress or in the voice
that pointed up to a bear in the heavens
she bore an odor of burnt almonds
and filled the dawn with its primitive dark.

 

 

 

Con la morte ho tentato seriamente
per un po’ è stata buona
ha rinunciato al suo impero universale
ha cominciato a muoversi caso per caso
ha lenito alcuni sussulti con il suo unguento
poi ha cominciato a intonare
una canzone cantata in re.

 

 

 

I gave death a serious try
for a while she behaved
she renounced her universal empire
she started to proceed case by case
she soothed some tremors with her ointment
and began to sing
a song in the key of D.

 

 

 

Con la morte ho cercato ancora
un patto, ma lei era astuta e discontinua
appariva nei traffici dell’amore,
diventava giallore e numero fisso
era il respiro e l’artiglio nel respiro un’ora murata
galleggiava nel fradiciume della vasca.

 

 

 

With death I searched again
for a deal, but she was cunning and fickle
she showed up in the traffic of love
she became jaundiced, a fixed integer,
she was the breath and the talon in the breath
a walled-up hour
was floating in the vessel’s rot.

 

 

 

Poi, di colpo, un lunedì di febbraio 
tutto è tornato come prima... è uscita
dal suo feudo,
ha fatto incursioni, all’alba,
nella casella della posta, ha ripreso
la sua cerimonia incessante, ha diffuso
un canto di puro gelo
ha cercato proprio noi.

 

 

 

Then, suddenly, a Monday in February 
everything turned back to its start... she left
her domain,
she made a raid, at dawn,
in the mailbox, she resumed
her ceaseless ceremony, she spread
a song of pure ice
she searched for us alone.

 

 

 

E ha cominciato a parlare,
quella figura plenaria,
come il capobranco della nostra fine
soffocava il lievito felice,
affondava con il piede la barca
infantile di due foglie
ci lanciava il suo avvertimento.

 

 

 

And she began to talk,
that plenary figure,
like the ringleader of our end
smothering the happy yeast,
tipping over the two-leaved
childish boat with her foot
she was giving us her warning.

 

 

 

“Sarai una sillaba senza luce,
non giungerai all’incanto, resterai
impigliato nelle stanze della tua logica”


“Sarai la crepa stessa
delle tue frasi,
una recidiva, una voce deportata, l’unica voce
che non si rigenera morendo”

 

 

 

“You will be a syllable without light,
you will not reach any enchantment,
you will be caught in the rooms of your logic”


“You will be the very crack
of your sentences, a recidivist,
a deported voice, the only voice
that is not brought back to life by dying”

 

 

 

two poems

By Maya Pindyck

The Story I Promised Not to Tell 

features a boy, beloved, snug in his olive
uniform, gun slung over his shoulder—soldier
praised for refusing the high-ranking officer
entry without ID because rules are rules and no
amount of shouting from a reddening commander
matters if you don’t know the man’s name or face.
The boy, I’m told, handled the officer with firm grace
and someone above was watching, captured
the moment on film and granted the boy his dream
of becoming a sniper atop a building, so he, too,
can watch from above. All the stray dogs break
the boy’s heart—he promises to kill anyone who kills
a dog. But a person, reminds his mother, means more
unless they pop from the hole to take you. We remember 
the boy bobbing in floaties, charming strangers as children
do when alive and splashing, cootchie coo cootchie coo.
I tell his mother I’m leaving for the hole. She hopes
someone denies me entry—you have kids don’t
be crazy. I tell her I need to see and put to body 
what I know from people’s stories and books and TV. 
Some call it bearing witness. I call it landing on earth
where boys persist amidst glistening branches clinging
to olives, and gravity exists. Where has the boy been?
In his bedroom he shows me different types of bullets—
the curved ones are the ones that can cut through two
people at once. Unfortunate if behind your target
your mother happens to stand or wave her hands. 
I lower my eye to the ocular lens and find a red cross
flashing. Make of him a monster, screams the commander
in me, to serve the right side of history. I offer him
a pot of dragon pearl tea. I show my ID. I can only see
the sun if I am sun-like, said Plotinus in different words,
and in third person. Do not go roughly into the worst
of nights, said the dead. The story I promised not to lose
features a boy holding his brother, or filling 
an amber dispenser to its brim—olive 
oil for you: second person point of view: shimmering
mother, once removed.

fathermouth

By sadé powell

fathermouth

who said pivoting isn’t pressure
doesn’t come with its own headwind

sometimes i blame you
for decisions i made
say you defeated me
or i’m defeated by you

but really
i’ve been distracted by a demon
we’ve come to love

casting you out was elemental
rarely evental
just a slow bone-deep static

i learned to speak
in the afterimage
of your silence

once i believed forgiveness
a verb of distance
a poethic interval
a way to keep me holy
and far

but weather became scar
and you
a collapsed architecture
shaped my ick

you ghost me
until the form needs a body

your love
a clerical error

your dying
a murmur of mercy
in a drawl i outgrew
a quiet rehearsal
for my release

how strange to pray
for the one
who unmade my heart

every sentence i form
still limping toward you
hurt as inheritance
grammar as grief

half erased by time
i mouth your name
like an old psalm
each syllable a tether
each prayer
a failure at bittering

paper-cut daddy
you arrive by margin

daddy as fallacy
as systemic glitch
in my making
as flicker
as milky text

the body re-members
what silence re-fuses

your hot guinness breath
your brick absence
all untranslatable bruise

let’s call it ambivalence
though it’s become
our faith

i won’t fix my face
to make your need
look legal

still
i’ve dreamt your hands clean
a miracle
i no longer expect

the hum of a man relic
buried in lines of gore

i learned to speak
inside your fracture

“little girl”
is what you call me
after my existence
dragged your voice
into its own coffin
of memory

if time can atone
let rot turn scriptural
let my cells lay it down
before spirit reenters

let my back
be all the dispensation
you see

repair—
a thin reed of freedom
i keep digging into
spent earth

your mind now
a field of locusts
the past fluttering
you thin-skinned

what you sowed
blooms in ruin

pops,
there’s no grace left
to cosign

things are just
living
and dead
between us

from Bright Machine

By Canisia Lubrin

We’re watching bones scuttle. Home scattering heirlooms.
Bones. Filling our spas. Bones cutting the grass. Another.
August. And still the war. Bones spreading the congress of crow’s
beak. Bones shredding the upstairs. The screen door netting.

Bones at the back. Of the coffee shop. Bone broth graves. Of course.
Aspirated by rage and dreams. Just bones in the banker’s box.
These are the bones of bones. Making the harvest. Bone by steady.
Bone. The Terms written. “The girls, sisters whose bones became
lessons,” said so tenderly. Remembered.

All her fond wishes. To all the students. Of bones we’ve become.
If we can say nothing else. Nothing enough to heave. A question.
A membrane on our shoulders. Our life-wide backs. Who will read.
Or bonfire all our longing. In this life. And do we hope after. All
The bells have hushed. Their threnodies. And we are full. Forget
Nothing. Our blare. Of swifts here. This hurricane lifting the bone.

That becoming life. Knows death. At 6 P.M. The day officially dark.

Here come the men of bronze. Men of iron. This canal.
Goes clean. Down the Gulf of Paria. 45 feet underneath.
There, grouper. There, catfish. Haul their hundred-pounded
Lives. Into the company of owls. Young blue herons, gagged,

still in their white frock. Here, brackish water.
Scarlet water. For the great egret’s scare landings.
The tri-coloured heron’s toss. Of white subaltern.
A flash of red Mangrove. Is the ibis blaring its horns.
At sunset. Remembering its black birth. After three years.

Of eating into red. Red until death. Who can claim a victory.
So easily. The Flamingoes’ route. To reddening their years.
You should see them. Nesting April to October. It was April
Two days ago. Now even the calendar arrives taxed. Scarlet.
Lettered by the officers who still think it is 1782. And sisters.
On sidewalks. Only rust the patriots. So fast, lovers sicken.

Why be precise with foresight. Wages. Precious with loss.

from Schenectady and dean

By Nazareth Hassan

The traffic light is on

This is 1524333. Goes

Person waits for each other 4

Person holding an umbrella: I’m waiting for the rain
Person + person + person sweating in the sun

Person waits for the first 4 to return

Person + Person facing each other: There are 20 feet
with no feet between them

Person + person is sitting on the stairs

khaki person pants mix with cement

Person’s feet person + person. Are related to the middle two legs

Person yells at person’s face:

Person does not answer:

One person does not answer:

Person does not answer:

Person does not exist:

Person cannot answer.

Person standing: person waiting for the rain in person’s voice:
person waiting for person to stop sweating

Person is more than 20 feet taller than person:
Their clothes sway in the air caused by person’s scream:

Person contemplating

Person does not exist.

Person follows person and continues screaming:
Person’s veins emit a yellow haze from under the skin:

Person tramples the cockroach and apologizes

Person passes through person + person’s airspace as
if they were in a gym.
Person doesn’t ask for help

Person gets down on his knees and kicks to find peace:
Person may be a little sad.

Person person + person. goes through

Person swings in the silence of person

Person doesn’t think they exist

Person does not allow Person to ask for help

Person crosses a sea of feet between them + soul of person

Person can project the Astral while passing through
the airspace of Person and Person

Person is wearing a t-shirt with anime characters

Person shouts at person so loudly that person starts whispering

This whisper is so imperceptible that it attracts many
specters that starve to death again.

Person lets person scream in their face.

Person smiles sweetly.

 

 

The traffic light is on a timer

It goes 1524333

A black woman waits for another 4

A black woman holds an umbrella: waiting for the rain

A black woman + a black woman + a black man sweat in the sun

A black woman waits for the first 4 to come back around

A black woman + a black man stand
directly across from each other:
there are 20 feet without legs between them

A white woman + a black man sit on steps

The white woman’s khakis blend in with the cement

The white woman’s legs belong to two of the feet
between a black woman + a black man

A black man screams in the white woman’s face

The white woman does not respond:

A black woman does not respond:

A black woman does not respond:

A black man does not exist:

A black man cannot respond.

The white woman stands: a black woman waits
for the rain to form in their voice:
The white woman waits for a
black man to stop sweating

A black woman crosses the 20
feet to the a black man:
Their clothes billow in the wind
created by a black man’s screams:

A black man ruminates

A black man does not exist. 

A black man follows the white w
oman and continues to scream:
their veins project a yellow mist
from beneath their skin:

The white woman steps on a cockroach and apologizes

A black woman passes thru
a black man + the white
woman’s airspace as if they
are on a jungle gym.

The white woman does not ask for help

A black woman falls to their
knees and digs to find peace:
she might be a little sad.

A black woman crosses back thru
the white woman + a black man

A black man swings on a black woman’s silence

A black man does not think they exist

A black man does not let
the white woman ask for help

A black man crosses the sea of feet between
them + a black woman’s ghost

A black woman might have astral
projected when crossing thru
The white woman and a black man’s airspace

A black man wears a t-shirt
with anime characters on it

A black man yells so hard at the white
woman that they begin to whisper

This whisper is so imperceptible
it attracts many memories
that have been in the midst
of dying for attention.

The white woman lets a black man yell in their face.

The white woman cracks a sweet smile.

The Giraffe Titan (I)

By Brandon Kilbourne

In the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the dinosaur exhibition is composed
largely of specimens excavated between 1906 and 1913 at Tendaguru, a site in
the former colony of German East Africa (today Tanzania). Of these dinosaurs,
the most iconic is Giraffatitan brancai. Coincidentally, European and other
major world powers met in Berlin, some twenty years prior to the dinosaurs’
excavation, at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), where these powers
negotiated their claims to regions of Africa for colonial expansion.

At the feet of a precipice-tall skeleton,
we wonder about the horrors of the Jurassic,
predators stalking, then slicing into, their prey.
Walking among Berlin’s exhibited bones
embodying bridge-span necks and column
limbs, lance-point armor and knife-lined jaws,
we try to picture a world beyond our ken,
subject to claws evolved as killing
personified, laws of unremitting savagery—
Imagine on an over-muggy Earth, a head
towering above in the domain of treetops
and dogfighting pterosaurs, imagine
the head-crowned neck crashing down
like a felled alder, the impact thundering
as if a deposed god was hurled to Earth;
in final moments, would the aged Titan be able
to imagine scavengers biting into its cold skin,
its bones swallowed by tidal mud? Could
it then possibly imagine a world beyond its ken
hundreds of thousands of millennia later
in which twenty men in Berlin would carve
its continent into plantations, mines, and ivory-
hunting grounds, their talons manifest in
massacres charring within burning villages,
famine’s gaunt ribs slowly quelling rebellions,
black skin in the mouths of ravenous empires?
Even if so, why try wondering at all?
A predator is a predator after all, regardless
of the time in Earth’s history—they simply
differ in their habit and the hunt: some
sink their honed teeth into a scaly hide,
a roar professing their territory; others
convene over a landmass map, howling
false claims in English, French, and German.

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