Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper

The Killing Time

A hindsight of blood.

The sill with its speck of ash: who smoked

there? Tea on the lip as

 

a forgetting of another endeavor.

Red: aligning quietly on the eaves

or beneath the skin: articulate, articulate.

 

The dream of the wheel, bird

sounds, red of the hip

like a wrist corsage.

 

~

 

Snow under the hand, a different kind of muteness.

Something you once belonged to, the lines smudged.

 

In the other memory the severed arm speaks.

In the other memory it is as silent as snow.

 

~

 

In the transient form

everything subject to question.

 

A tilt, a bruise.

 

Later on, the killing time.

 

~

 

Next to your eye, a door.

Next to your door, a vestibule.

Next to your vestibule, it opens.

 

Now give me your mouth—

 

~

 

In the study of distance

everything meets the eye

as pool blue.

 

A cool light, undecided, comes

over the mountain.

 

The cloudswift sky unbuttons.

 

Everything remembers everything.

Published: | Online 2014

J. Mae Barizo

Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo’s first book, The Cumulus Effect, is forthcoming in 2015 from Four Way Books. She is a 2014 Poets House fellow. Her poetry and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, The Paris Review Online, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. A classically trained musician and a champion of cross-genre work, J. Mae has performed sound/text collaborations with musicians from The National, Bon Iver, and the American String Quartet. (updated 8/2014)

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