The Brooklyn Rail

MARCH 2022

All Issues
MARCH 2022 Issue
Poetry

two


Sentences Upon Emergent Devotions


To me, Mammon, Baalial, the devil aspects of dark

You would dedicate a man in himself.

Gendered in this dedication,

I’ve neared consciousness enough

To taste what farts would go to what mouths.

Don’t call it ingenious use of the materials

And signs that would carry me,

This thingly, distributed body

Inside words like gas, mineral

Compressed, aurora, Big Gulp

Until imagination abandons leaving only men

Huffing poppers to narrow the world

Into something you can swallow

Yourselves down and out,

Recycling piss in perfect loops.

Transaction, pleased?

Can you speak? I don’t care

Enough to hear you

But I do enough to look

And see you receiving what night

And wind, gravel and easement lights

Over the safe and private yard.

Will you heal?

What do you think you’re asking?

You dress me in horns, in tongues,

In muscles, you take only one light

From my eyes, you rage, you remember to breathe,

You use and wipe and smear. You think

The mountain is rising, decorated in its metals.

Your dreams take you into small rooms to cum.

The wind finally gets free enough to run

Through you and you think it rushes at a hillside

That must lift my throne. The raven visits

Always over your left shoulder and you are so grateful

To be in its downcast, yellow eye.








Poem


in the would-be undivided
a dust turns
barely arrowed
by a car or panning video camera
or truisms


turning,
susceptible,
we save ourselves,
which preserves
and gifts the undivided
their susceptibility?


keeping my bare feet clean
because you like that, dusty
because I like that,


patio bricks reclaim their surface
from the sun, replaced now by yellow petals
carried down into cracks alive by ants


pulled by some expectation
just ahead, each truism held
through a day of professional
development rewarded


with a nation that floats three inches


above this land no corner of which
doesn’t offer itself as night

Contributor

Farid Matuk

Farid Matuk’s forthcoming projects are a new translation of Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrilica, which he co-edited with Carmen Giménez-Smith and Anthony Cody (Noemi Press), and Redolent, a book-arts collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez (Singing Saw Press).

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The Brooklyn Rail

MARCH 2022

All Issues