Vilified illustrations
mask the minds canals
No birds sing but they just buzz around
in circular epiphanies
-possibilities of flight

I think of your amethyst paintings
the way you lay out autumn for these birds to feed
tabahi
tauba
tazurba
Words become anklets to this unrestful leg of a painter
her hands buzz over the paper
words leave the paintbrush
and autumn becomes a dictionary

dhuk dhuk
the fluttering of the waves
besahara
bechain
beintaha
beizzat
branches of the night
there is too much saliva on the color-mixer
It steals that lux from our amethyst

The writing drips like rainwater…

The horizon breaks every moon I rest on its elbows.

.

It throws toys at me. Aimed directly at my belly. It knows I can eat clay and live in the shadows of water.

.

The horizon screams for attention in its absence. Where am I, it asks while merging with the beginning and the end.

.

The label of a writer is the same as any other label- a handwritten sticky note on a repurposed jar. Bring me to the front rows- make me the holder of rice. …

I am signing off as an editor of BNG. BNG was Ashley Evenson’s baby and dream (at least as I saw it) and I was happy to jump on this when she asked me to. We became partners. To me BNG was always about inclusivity and challenging the way we think and create art — in a way that we slowly expand and become patient and tolerant towards one another. I think Ashley Evenson always wanted it to be a safe place for ‘outsiders’. Ironically, Ashley and I had diverse visions for BNG and diverse approaches which made BNG special…

Through the blinding turns of language
To the nouns that settle at the bottom of glasses brimming with soda
To the wordlets rising like bubbles only to be cut by the liquid

I blink poetry

Blink poetry is the form that rises when sound barely makes it to the sea
The water separates from air like a lover sucked by the military
Words gallop for the breath and the soul to follow
Children of the word gulp down milk at night and more soda at birthdays

Young children lust after what adults cannot fathom They blinked through those ages when…

Scratched into steel — the photography of the outside vision

[The flip side of a sunny side up. Birthmarks — scratches. screeches — lines of yolk everywhere]

— Okay, here is the poem —

Even from a tower, vehicle tyre sounds roll in the sinks of this house.
Even at an inclination, this house is a bus — filled with fumes of lost experiments

A ghost train. A ghost argument. A ghost night
burns in the candles: headlights of this bus

Those letters written from the road, hang in my photo room They dry and get wet again and then…

In film memory of a conversation.

As ink falls on simmering oil. I watch an artist left alone with the fumes of their splintered curiosity. What? Signatures fly like birds and nature doesn’t demand consent. What? Thereafter, therefore, thereby: she floats away in a wooden canoe actually made of plastic. We don’t know and we will never know, if she doesn’t know what she floats on.

Questions to an () artist:

1. What is the first question you would ask yourself? Alone and in public
2. Close your eyes, see an artist. Describe an artist. The image and the imagination
3. Is ink…

Falsetto

Aluminium closure of the throat

The poets croak a metal

The man drags its feet to the next Apple store

The poem is flattened dough, rolled too thin to be picked

In the process of union- they split like butter and sand

For the breaking voice is a sign of an honest try – the falsetto is a steel waterfall slicing the river with gravity

The river combines like water always does, the dough meets itself in the hand

How loud is the poet emerging from the words- scattered on concrete platform where travellers walk through one another’s moving…