Featured

Volume 11.2

Craig Blais
—
[all my mom has to do is withstand a three hour timeshare pitch]

For the lovers who exchange cardamom
seeds in secret
and the man who placates
the spirits of murdered
children in an empty auditorium.
For the woman chosen
and discarded like an embroidered robe
and the man shot dead
in January.

For she who gathers
clusters of yellow mimosa
from the hands of strangers
and he who, day by day,
sifts through the meaningless refuse
for a carmine-colored scarf.

For those of us who slip in and out
of apartment buildings
and perch on windowsills
to hold each other in night’s
most honest hours,
singing words in a language
we have never learned, its strange beauty
a calligraphy etched
of our most outrageous desires.

For the untruthful,
and those who tell half-truths—

For those who did not choose the gun that shot,
or the bomb that fell, or the blood watering the few weeds in the distant city.

Who certainly did not know a woman
would be weeping
and calling to us the name of him
she would never wed,
or that fifty years would be collapsed into nothing
in one second
of rage.

What must we do but ground the garlic
and watch it grow hard
and useless in the mortar?

What else but pretend these walls encompass
all that is:
the never-ending oranges
protecting their healing juices
and the almonds stacked like ammunition
in small glass jars?

 I swear to all witnesses 
I did not mean the dried roses
you gave me to blow away
that afternoon.

I swear to God I did not expect all
you and I have together
to smell one day of cardamom
and the next day,
of death.

Kara Barlow is a trilingual poet studying her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Over the past several years, she has lived in the Dominican Republic, rural Spain, Rome, and Costa Rica, and she wrestles with questions of fragmentation, suffering, and the violence at the heart of the human experience through her poetry. She considers her work as a translation exercise between complex realities of trauma, resilience, and longing.

Kara Barlow is a trilingual poet studying her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Over the past several years, she has lived in the Dominican Republic, rural Spain, Rome, and Costa Rica, and she wrestles with questions of fragmentation, suffering, and the violence at the heart of the human experience through her poetry. She considers her work as a translation exercise between complex realities of trauma, resilience, and longing.