Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
Pay Per View
Don’t knock my dish.
I hold it dear, unincidental
at the household’s entryway: there is
intelligence in its half-
cocked concavity. No fixity of
whereabouts: and no direction but the shifting one
from whose beyond the next
known jolt could come.
Not homeless, just never at home,
just always out to lunch, just always in the head.
Soon enough I’ll have to see
real soil, real sand, real loam, real loess, real lee—earth’s ditch at large
where even shake’s unsure. Just go
in my loo, just creep
in my crapper, from which
the whole
damn world looks pure.
Heather McHugh
Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and as a Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her most recent book is The Father of the Predicament (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), and she and her husband, Nikolai Popov, translated a book of 101 poems of Paul Celan entitled Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). (updated 2023)
McHugh’s Eyeshot was reviewed in AGNI Online by Kevin McFadden.