Insects eradicate loneliness
all the time.
The flood was never god's.
(
)
Angels choose ghosts for god. I’m lonely when you’re here and not when you’re not. For emphasis, don’t read this if you’re not my brother. If you are, don’t read this aloud. I’ve never been to a strange place. My son writes a story about a cannibal eating the mother of the antichrist. I want to fix the devil. The story goes deeper than I want it to. I drink all day. My sons are alive. My sons tell me they can be alive in their sleep. I want to test god. I give a pill to Adam and he waits for my signal. When Adam dies, he dies thinking his stomach is where it should be. My longing isn’t ready.
nothing
finds nothing
to adore
adores
it all
for Mark Lanegan
Ohio is prose
bruised
roadkill
and Ohio
is the tugged-at
insides
of a videocassette
and Ohio
has one
good wrist
and one
blood-shy
nose
And there are lakes
in Ohio
that dream
their fish
and the fish
still die
But it's okay, dream
dream it's
okay
Don't
provoke
longing
for Mark Lanegan
Snow grief
and star
grief
so rarely
die
during the removal
of thunder's
stomach
that I thought
twice
and killed
with no help
from god
a red
fly
on a blue
train
Two divers
who will never
meet,
meet.
I am so
deeply
dumb. Most waters
are born
missing.
We're just
god's search
for evidence
of us
THEOPHANIES
poems, Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books, 2024
~
At the intersection of accidental and borrowed dialogues, there exists a holiness uncovered as a pre-existing condition and it’s there you may find Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poems as they have been carried into and out of, as they have been consoled for and cared for within, the collection Theophanies. These are musics of temporary permanence, and I now, as you soon, will not refrain from our mild but wholly offered singing. Precious and profane, mistake and miracle, these poems know praise as theft and ask the body to unfollow its gut. As a reader, I am always struck by loss in a way that makes me present, and, while I was struck no less different in the open places that Ghazal Ali closes with their housed verse, the queried losses made a trinity of new interrogations. The first loss of a language that uses sound to be seen, the double loss of birth, and the past loss of being given a name you can’t be called. I was present and was also soon to be made present. By its end, its beginning had restarted the proxy resurrections of its revelations, and I plainly understood and beautifully misunderstood what it meant or did not mean to be under those lowest gods that gift clay to any prayerful form bent from its time as a shape. Theophanies is a vessel that travels unveiled in a vision all should have.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
You can't
behead
an owl.
Snakes
don't dream.
We throw eggs at the sun
but it's a world
of eggs. Touch
is spotlight's
last meal
kingsoftrain 