Aaron El Sabrout
Leaves barely shivering in the thickening stillness,
just to show that they’re alive & they drink too.
The tree with the knobbly spiked flower dick
doesn’t question its embodiment--it just bodies.
It is just a body. What if my body was just a body?

A motorcycle revving in the alleyway/
a masculinity built on gasoline.

Who does gender serve?
Not me, on the toilet at 4 AM
in the blue moonlight. Not a body
wracked with sweat shivers, not
the chub rub that welts slickly
between sticky thighs.

A hudhud cries midday, that danker morning,
calls me back to dusty Maadi lunch-as-breakfast
bisilla & bouftek & cucumber spears. “I was born
in seconds, do you feel me?” Somehow I cobble
this identity together in objects: this mug from
the grand canyon, this bathrobe from Winners.

But they fall apart, rotate in & out.

I too rotate in & out of bodies, out of selves,
first Pokémon t-shirt, sombrero & banana,
now notebook & paint jeans & glasses,
and then?

On the beach the wannabe Maya head
and the somewhere-maybe pyramid
are still sand, sloughing into the sea.
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The ironic or sort of meta thing about this piece is that now, years after writing it, the parts I relate to least and even kind of cringe at are the cultural references in it. Which is sort of the point of the poem! Identity is a shifting thing and it takes work to recognize how you've changed without judging or belittling that version of yourself.

Aaron El Sabrout on King Krule & Mexican Street Sounds & Medicine Tea
Color photograph if Kave Akbar's book, Pilgrim Bell, with two lit candles
Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell Rings True

"Despite his unconventional use of language, Akbar still has great respect for its power. There’s a kind of beauty in the way that he uses it to unconventional ends. The absurdity of the structure of some of his poems proves language is just as valuable for its rules as it is for the artful ways they can be broken."

via LOYOLA PHOENIX
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Cover of Wanda Coleman's pamphlet, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, from Black Sparrow Press
What Sparks Poetry:
Dana Levin on Wanda Coleman's "The Woman and Her Thang"

"Standing at the magazine rack at Beyond Baroque, I opened Coleman’s chapbook at random and read: 'She kept it in a black green felt-lined box.' Ten monosyllabs—how I loved saying them, each one a kind of floating stone in the mouth—introducing the speaker’s 'thang': seductive and dangerous, wreaking havoc on her love life."
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18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 10-15, 2022

We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home.
 
Workshop Faculty: Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Chard deNiord, Mark Doty, Yona Harvey, John Murillo, Matthew Olzmann and Diane Seuss. One-On-One Conferences with Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres. A special Craft Talk by Kwame Dawes. Special Guest Poet: Yusef Komunyakaa. Poet-at-Large: Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
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