Tethered to Stars by Fady Joudah

Author:Fady Joudah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Equinox

A gift economy stuffs its pockets

with stones that hold

their shape like water.

We’re more water than blood,

and more than water, a sea

isn’t a river, just ask the rain.

We’re other worms

for other silk roads,

a theory unified,

a dream of nucleotides.

Isomers & Isotopes

1.

Our paradise is trampled.

Our childhood wasn’t insured,

it endured in damaged dwellings.

1.

No paradise is untrampled,

it formicates us junkies.

We spin to love,

murder, suicide, and our lips

are our hips, silage and cud.

1.

As grownups, for decades

in pecuniary bliss,

our resale value tripled that of our parents.

2.

From room to room

the rain had risen from the sea,

from room to room our cells merged their fires

with the darkness of our sleep.

2.

The beat follows you affectless.

2.

The rain had risen from the sea to gentrify us,

Oh Aspergillus fumigatus, the detritus

was mostly next door.

2.

We met our deductible

and it was low.

We rolled our years

then smoked our years.

3.

I was a visitor,

was just visiting when she died

in the hospital where I was born.

3.

I was visiting her faculties as a plastic tube

sealed her windpipes which a mass

from her esophagus had burrowed into.

3.

In farewell she wrote on clipboard

“Revolution ‘til we triumph.”

4.

She went through a lot to get here,

through concrete and dried up in it.

Then pirates took her in. She learned their songs

and the earliest of them was in a wedding.

4.

“Ma’am, your fat pads are not who they say they are,

and since the rise of the eye-snatchers

we can’t be sure of your retinal Hancock.”

4.

I drabbled and droned semantic remorse,

Eddie the monster, Eddie the horse,

and was just at another queen’s court

when my parents crossed as time on a rock

that pokes a rib chronic.

4.

“Ma’am, the shaman who offered you

the first stems to sprout in snow,

did she say her name?”

In stereo, in stereo

we prolong the music,

we’re good at rotating

light, polarizing it,

there’s language between us.

5.

And clusters discrete from other clusters

to prevent our closing up on ourselves

as we wait for the sun to change its ways.

5.

Reliably the weather

invariably comes

with maps.

6.

If white came first, if red

stole the brain’s flow until stars appeared

portals for blue.

6.

Omnipresent

the beast follows you affectless.

6.

Smooth gray hairless scalp

of a head preserved in rotting,

casing vestigial

and orbital cavities.

6.

The torso displays

arachnoid limbs and pterosauroid wings.

The splendor’s in the thing’s fluidity:

it flows in water and you walk on air.

6.

This isn’t Death but the God

of your childhood enuresis.

Decades have passed

since you last wet your bed,

still your body insists

on messengers on mute.

7.

Dreams like phantom limbs.

Dreams of bladders on the verge.

7.

Therefore, the villages

are tickled with irrigation

and krill travels deep in a gray whale suit.

Therefore, herrings pleat coves

white with egg and sperm.

7.

As for sirens—those always cease when they reach me.

Those I always hear.

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