Sprawled and limp on the limp and
stained linoleum floor stained
she sits beside the door she sits
shattered Shattered.
3.
She was a complete scatterbrain
Everything she held fell from her hands
And she had a memory like a butterfly’s
A thought in, a thought out.
She only remembered the path to work and back well
It was as if she had grown up there herself – in her own greenhouse
There she would never forget them – the azaleas, orchids, Chinese fici, and also –
A Song About Bread
Here it is, the harsh brutality,
The full meaning of human suffering!
The sickle cuts the heavy ears of wheat
The way they slit throats of swans.
Since time immemorial, our field
Has known the morning shudder of August.
Straw is tied up in bundles,
Each bundle lies there like a yellow corpse.
Carts, like hearses, carry them
"#imaginary," "#genuine" and "#phenomena" belong to a series titled with words from Marianne Moore's "Poetry" that I have hashtagged and run through various social media platforms—Reddit and Twitter most often, though Instagram has played a role as well. Each poem is then sculpted from its hashtag's search results.
#imaginary
For the past year I’ve been mentoring a student at NYU Abu Dhabi, Vamika Sinha, on her hybrid project Cranes, which is a mix of poetry and essays, and has to do with identity and moving through the world as a young woman of colour—a 21st flâneuse who’s discovering the failures of cosmopolitanism, the burden of hyphens, and how art is a kind of hunger that fills and sustains us.
