daayan conjures up a forest
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it is night again. the woods are verdant,
marshy, wet; somehow, the crops dry anyway. we thirst anyway. this story is depressingly old : on the plateau where mud sinks into river, i sit with a bottle i’m not allowed to buy. i can’t remember where it came from. i can’t remember why i’m sitting in the woods with a drink anyway. but since i’m here, i’ll make the trees — the bushes, even — give green a rest. try red instead. try the fire the women in my family called mark of a changed girl. try palash, gift from yet another goddess, & our lady of power, at that : she from the mountains, born again after a man shamed her, & she couldn’t bear to live any longer. i wish i didn’t know this story : the baddest woman burning for some man. forget rebirth. forget parvati, sati, any mysticism making us smolder. give me flowers budding grey — whole fields of softly-shaking grasses, daylight devoid of hue. let there be no sign of blush, love, anger — i want absence, less-ness, static : a landscape colored so dismally, even i can’t shock us all awake — |
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Indian American poet Raena Shirali grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where she currently lives and teaches English at College of Charleston. Her first book, GILT, is forthcoming in 2017 with YesYes Books, and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, Indiana Review, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and many more. Her other honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She will also be the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry, and currently serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine. You can find more of her work at www.raenashirali.com.
Tokihiro Sato was born in 1957 in Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. Trained as a sculptor, he has been using photography since the late 1980s to express his ideas about light and space. In his best-known series, Photo Respiration, tiny points of light or illuminated lines record his movements through space. Using a large-format camera set on a tripod and timed for exposures that may last from one to three hours, he moves quickly through the described space. When shooting in daylight, he flashes a mirror at the sun. At night, or indoors, he uses a flashlight. The resulting photographs capture exquisitely detailed scenes punctuated by pinpoints or linear patterns of light that depict the artist’s presence but not his image. For more than thirty years, Sato has exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the world. His photographs are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and many other important institutions.