Digital Poetics 3.12: Broken Ghazal in 22 sentences (222 words) by Bhanu Kapil
Video still, On Nationalism: The Fragility and Possibility of We, NY 2022.
Antique, gritty, I left England, never to be seen again.
Shop-worn, powerful, I returned. This is me, reading Lol Stein on the hob of midsummer dusk.
In Laramie, we boiled coffee in a sock above a stream. Antelope, I repeated. Antelope, my partner murmured.
No poem if the handsome couple (Welsh, English) had not relinquished their home like so many armfuls of damp wheat, the bolt of lemon-yellow silk they'd asked for in the first place.
Three sentences for the ghazal:
1. Milk-orange pelicans and navy-blue herons matchy-match in the quarry, or was it a lake?
2. With a hiss, the frosted glass closed behind me before I could turn. Father, mother, sister.
3. Yesterday, two snakes slid off the path into the agricultural canal.
Between the first sentence and the second lie 28 years. Between the first and third, 8 weeks. Sentence 2 is first.
A fire in Arizona, says my friend, wrinkling her nose. The moon is red, a snake climbs the wall.
The border opens like a valve, less complex than a supermarket.
What sucks me in serrates others.
What kept me safe serrated others.
What I saw could always be added to, like a description.
What I experienced in relationships became a form of heat, which dissipated.
The delicate memory of leaving my family is a form of suction in its own right.
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Bhanu Kapil is the author of six books, most recently How To Wash A Heart (Pavilion Poetry), and a new edition of Incubation: a space for monsters (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press, with new writing on performance and a preface by Eunsong Kim, in 2022).
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
