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Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.

Desire

wishes to pass through a barrier. When you are a kid
it is restraint upon hands, then it is awkwardness of
clothes, then it is the yielding solidities to pene-
tration in the body of a girl. The back side of sex
is a dream of something as completely opposite as the
area behind a mirror: you sense hidden around you,
like a body of clear air you can’t see, the possibility
of falling through a knot of blood in your groin into
the body of a woman who is an invisible country. The
sun shines there as in a negative, glossy with death,
so black it tinctures fields a copper green.

Poetry
Altar
Poetry
The Rain
by Humberto Ak'abal
Translated from the Spanish by Michael Bazzett
Portrait of James Applewhite

James Applewhite teaches at Duke. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Daytime and Starlight and A Diary of Altered Light. (updated 6/2010)

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