The Book Stack pt. 2

"Inclined to Speak...is like Wolfbane when you hear the werewolf howling. It opens to door to a world breathing like our own, but adding dimensions that deepen our understanding of where we are and what time it is, that are immense, dreadful and wonderful."
- Amiri Baraka

Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry,
edited by Hayan Charara

Apprentice by Assef Al-Jundi

There is a restlessness in me
that gets worse when I rest.

When I told you
I have been practicing
your art of disappearing,
You smiled excitedly,
said something,
then disappeared.

I sit in a chair that is not there
and fall to the ground

The Riddle of the Shrink by Nuar Alsadir

It is the distress of losing a ticket
or any other document granting passage.

When the phone disconnects
just as you were about to be let in

on a secret, you became the letter
that never receives a response, the ball

that rolls under the neighbor's fence and stays.
The friend you have entrusted with your death

song, an editor, has changed the words.
Now it is you, not your modifiers,

who will dangle, suspended between this world
and the next. The image of the future

is the memory of the dream in which
you are standing before a kiosk, attempting

a transaction with a forgotten code.
The more you talk, the more you are left alone.

At times, you are curious whether or not
someone is in the room, but fear it would be

too revealing to check. At times, you strain
to hear another's conversation while feigning

involvement in you own. When the subway doors
open and everyone rushes in to take a seat,

you are trying to get over to the right lane
in fast traffic. It is like wearing stockings

with a stretched-out waistband under a skirt,
or dreaming that the alarm is about to go off.

The Gallery by Kazim Ali

You came to the desert, spirit-ridden
illiterate, intending to starve

The sun hand of the violin carving through space
the endless landscape

Acres of ochre, the dust-blue sky, or the stranger,
casually surveying the room

The young man beside you is peering carefully into "The Man Who Taught William Blake Painting in His Dreams"

You are thinking: I am ready to be touched now, ready to be found

He is thinking: How lost, how endless I feel this afternoon

When will you know: all night: sounds

Violet's brief engines

The violin's empty stomach resonates

Music is a scar unraveling itself in strings

An army of hungry notes shiver down the four strings' furrow

You came to the desert intending to starve so starve