Three Poems By Trish Salah
Turning Looks (with apologies to R.M.R.)
And you long almost
for what she had won
by looking
for what she did.
a gaping white wide
Longing, too
knowing always
it was hers Perhaps
in an abundant world
grasp
Your turn
drew gifts
out of that almost
thinking in of her
A look of one
perhaps, one
who
If, with words won
for a mouth,
longish looks
where eyes should be,
possessed,
she watched
their eagerness.
almost
Watching the break drowned
them, there against
promising looks
never a stranger at
his table
dying of looks.
The search after
her secret
her misery secret, even
from her
she never felt winter stopped
he felt as per never.
to blank, your name
skerry sightless, analogize
a perfect day, do you copy? innocence
omniscience, putative twaddle
forbearing limewire, remixes or cancopy acts
the privatization of love, labour, faith vs. the versus
wherein the other answer is always where projective terror
lies analogic and Freudian for dildonics, telegraph copse like you used
to know last summer’s corpse or intuitive
shift, politely from a girl with the empire (waist) II
arousing skritti politti fagginess, simmering
a halter toss slam, trying to judge the Algerian revolution
go gleeful as a gasser from Madagascar
oh just stop it! did hagar get a bad rap? did al haig? el hajj?
strike three for ahistoricism, lack of cultural context—
or to slap you you you where the sun don’t
when you gave up your place in the water and the other cheek
was the idea a long wet expulsive list?
dystopic on 616
i need to take a shower. i’m troubled by
increasingly distorted fanfictions, psychotic or melancholy,
with the loss of canon. i keep thinking there is a cure
for being awake that doesn’t involve fairies, pot or poutine.
i need to go to school. i am involved in
a memory relapse; i am particular about insults
i am aware of the i and troubled by it, possible worlds’
inflection, inflecting an i that leans towards
smothering, then purges. to generalize then, gross
conformity haunts narrower days in an inconveniently belated
montreal.
Trish Salah writes poetry, fiction and criticism, and teaches at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia
University and in Sociology at Bishop's University. She has new work in the current issues of Atlantis and
Canadian Theatre Review, and in the online journals Drunken Boat and EOAGH. Her first book of poetry,
Wanting in Arabic, was published by TSAR in 2002.