Featured Poet: Jen Nafziger, U.S.A

When she’s not rebelling against directions to “Place Stamp Here,” Jen Nafziger can usually be seen running a small dog around Taichung city. Or at the Spice Shop eating Palak Paneer. She really loves that Palak Paneer.

At Least Convicts Know It’s a Last Meal

This morning my egg broke.
Fell off the table before I could
fry it.

She stared at my bald spot when
I bent down with the tea cozy to clean.
We were out of towels.

All day I felt the bags packing in my head.
All day my jaw crept inside my mouth
and pulled my eyes down like a sheet.

And braiding clay monsters on the porch
of her leaving soon in the darkness,
we waited,

in light enough to see her smiling
rolling earth between her fingers.

in light enough to know that she
wasn’t dressed for bed.

Her slender versions of ‘goodbye’
are five smooth toes by Rodin—

What do we know about that’s not a lie?

The Hourglass

On the museum’s dusty shelf an hourglass rests
With stagnant sand and creaking posts.
Once dear to Lorenzetti, a curvy trap that ticked the days
Now breeds a wagging cough, reminding me of sleep.

An hourglass big enough for two,
whose rigid flipping steadied days,
and charmed the tired warden through the night,
left a corner recluse in a long-forgotten wing.

Do we ache to hold each hand still?
Or must my hand need to slap
Yours away and curl to the wrist,
Like a tomcat’s firecracker tail?

I found the hourglass panting in the corner.
It’s chafing heaves on my neck and following
each step like you had whispered it to measure
How I spend my days alone.

Sereem

Bohos: in an easy-chair, asleep with sandbag feet
and snoring, “hyestan, hyestan” through your nostrils.
Chin on beveled clavicle, dreaming of fire in the pantry
and your mother’s hair across the kitchen floor.

And hand in hand with Dada Tunyel, barefoot,
naked, bleeding in the desert you walked and
watched the baker’s beard skip across the dunes—
that night your feet were taught to sink and sway.

On Ramala’s wedding day, you toasted wine
too much and through your cedar can eastward yelling,
“Take it back you vermin Turks!” In the old words
you made me sing to you, “sereem kesee, sereem.”

Awake you share no words to mark us. No lesson
in the garden for the names of roots and trellissed vines.
Your quiet two-step, tidy among the rows and rows
of magnolia trees, is stepped alone, is stepped away,
and is as pale as the docks in the morning.