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Oksana Maksymchuk
Waking up in a borrowed room, in a body
borrowed for a time, in a time
borrowed and hardly used


I remember how light
my head becomes when the boys overtaking us
in the alley tickle me with guns


running them down my spine, then my hip
How I levitate, the force of a scream suppressed
lifting me up and up!


And the way it gets dark when strange men
pound on my door at night
shouting “Open up, or we’ll break it in!”


Right before the war, I’d wake up in bed
dreaming of another bed, body in it exposed
bone by bone, like a radiograph


through a brilliance, an explosion
tearing at the membranes
that ensconce the sleeper


Close, yet not
an exact match, like a rhyme in a poem
you compose posthaste, lines
blurred by terror
from the journal PLUME
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Can one prepare oneself for a violent death? The poem reflects my attempt to do so—by trying it on. As I was awaiting the invasion, I rehearsed suffering different types of bodily harm, sometimes from memory, sometimes through imagination, attempting to find words for each kind's unique flavor. What would it mean to witness, endure, and, perhaps, survive—a group of men armed with guns, a bomb, a missile?

Oksana Maksymchuk on "Approximations"
Black-on-white graphic of four Chinese written characters
"On Homophonic Association"

"The longer I looked at the Chinese character, the more it became an object—the little picture that it is. In the picture there was a feeling. And I bowed to the character because it did what a poem does: contain a feeling. Each character a picture, and in the picture, a poem."

via FUTUREFEED
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Cover image of the cover of Laila Malik's book, archipelago
What Sparks Poetry:
Laila Malik on "the organic properties of sand"


"In the petroleum economies of al Khaleej (as elsewhere), there exist micro-universes of so-called expats, a blossoming confusion of recent arrivals and longstanding, multi-generational clans, the newly affluent and then those others who live at the porous boundaries of the less desirable micro-universe of outsiders, migrant workers."
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