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.
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)