Father learned exile by television
And this was wartime.
Mother washed. I sat quietly with a tin
Full of pictures. Night drew.
My hands grew warm touching their faces
In youth.

There was a roll of bills 
in a pocket in the closet
But why had she shown it to me?
Mother's hands made rough
sounds on her uniform.
It was green
Like the tips of my eyes, now bedtime.

The corners I touched felt like tusks.
"We say elephant tears," he once said.
In my picture tin
The war raged on: black and white
A fugitive zebra on the street
With my heart pulsing red in its mouth.
from the book OCTOBERS / University of Pittsburgh Press
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"The Picture Tin," takes its form and inspiration from "A Book Full of Pictures," by Charles Simic. Simic grew up in Beglrade during WWII, during active war and bombings. His childhood singed by that experience. I lived three years into the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan before my family was forced to flee, to leave everything and everyone we knew—a rupture that certainly colored my childhood, if not my life entirely.

Sahar Muradi on "The Picture Tin"
Headshot of Rachel Eliza Griffiths
"A Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths"

"One of the reasons that I wrote Promise, which takes place during the late 1950s, was because I was interested in imagining the world that raised my parents, who were born in the early 1950s. The traditions, histories, and memories they experienced obviously affected the ways in which they raised me. History never feels far away. It is immediate, intimate, and revelatory in how I investigate and challenge the world and the selves contained within. I often think obsessively about how the past manifests in my own life, my decisions and perspectives, and how it will affect my future."

viaADROIT
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Cover of Fog and Smoke
What Sparks Poetry:
Katie Peterson on Other Arts


"I find this to be common with poems, which are like my favorite kind of children – give them a job to do, and they'd rather do anything else. But give them nothing to do, and they hate you. A poem ends up being equal parts what you must do and what you want to do, but in a way, with a proportion, inhabiting a mood you can't predict. A map offers a perfect occasion for this, since, like a family portrait, what it leaves in points towards what it leaves out. The poem became about everything the map couldn't record."
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