Viewer Survey
Have you dressed for the mirror today
Have you draped the darkening glass in gauze
Do you still see
July is waning and the dahlias look
askance at the wasteland we have made Do you still
your incessant plunder
Do you line your lips in plum tones
Where you’re watching
is watched Do you still see and
is it seeing that matters
What have you learned this year
other than the shapes of limbs severed from abdomens
or the long slouch of a face falling from its skull
Inside the panopticon where you pass
the time arranging a bouquet of summer blooms
do you know you are not free Did you
notice the blood crusting at the edges of the vase
Millefeuille
She took her bravery
out for a night on the town,
got her nails done, draped her in roses.
She ordered her steak rare.
On her best behavior, delicate
choreography of wonder
and defiance. What
the fuck are we doing here
she kept asking, there’s a chandelier
the size of an unexploded missile
hanging from the ceiling and
not a corpse in sight.
But that wasn’t true.
Every grand metropolis is built on ruins.
It is the height of refinement
to look upon history
with cultivated dispassion, as one
might a millefeuille, presented after
the blood-soaked entrée,
the thousand layers of collateral damage
now a confection or a lazy metaphor.
Her bravery broke out in hives.
It’s often misidentified, and the room
was crowded with bright gowns and
dulled silverware. And she was alone
in a spectacular expanse.
They always say it is bravery,
Of the barbarous,
Of the untamed
They never think of courage,
Of the seat of feelings,
Of the bruised and clamoring heart.
***
Author photograph by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
