So this is how you think it is—hypocrisy and exhaltation, the rumble and rout of papier mache floats like river barges piled with double decks of bead-pitching drunks rolling porte-flambeaux from Tchoupitoulas Street clear to Canal, heads all John- the-Baptist on plate collars, and dancing- Salome spilling Vedic agni out in hot dribbles of burning […]
Poetry 89
Hala Alyan: Aubade
Dancing until the sky darted with gold, eardrums pulse echoes. Even the muezzin is muted, underwater humming as men carry fires for prickly pears and drum each engine into a snare bass. Up ahead the buildings spire into their ugly gray, drops of water startle from the cloudless sky— laundry dribbling from clothespins, or condensation […]
Hala Alyan: Apology
They are burning tires in Tripoli. I bought new perfume, sulfurous, the bottle of clouded glass. Know this: yours is the name that slid first to my lips when the light became enormous and the anxious voices flared like starlings, dozens of them, alit, alit. Only the rubber melts. Steel only chars and the eclipse […]
John Blair
John Blair’s short story collection, American Standard, was the 2002 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He also has two books of poetry & two novels, as well as poems & stories in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, […]