where still the wind comes and blows
like Resurrection’s afterthought.

Night

Inverted canoes stationed along the shore;
Unattended sarcophagi by the boiling foam.

God breathes

Ink-splashes of the Unsaid above the Arabic-scripted sea.

 

Aslan Cohen is a graduate student at the Divinity School.

Vehemence in deity or coalition dearth ensures.
Upon joyful spite all worldly blunder depends.
O optative art, – its slovenly soar, choirboys’ mouths
Drooling past pews of fading alms – access is denied.

Next up, revolutions mark umbra on the screen.
The sketches pile even as the marriage is annulled.
The office has ceased to be Euclidean. So, let hence
Be hence. In profile, the weaker eye is forgiven.

Brian Ng is a third-year majoring in Economics and English Literature. He received a Summer Arts grant from the UChicago Arts Council, and is working on a chapbook and a play on security exploits.

This poem is reprinted with permission from Matter.

Christopher Kempf is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Chicago.  A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, his poetry and essays have appeared most recently in Gulf Coast, Jacobin, Kenyon Review, The New Inquiry, and The New Republic, among other places.  He received his MFA from Cornell University. Read more of his work at   christopherkempf.tumblr.com.

 

my grandfather stands behind me—

his brittle palms on my shoulders,

birthing a scene I will never witness.

Through each rasp he swings his arms,

cutting air in dry arcs, with his poison so tender

that I can’t grasp how my father

could resist such a performance.

And how I, at the ripe age

of carefree, manage a sighing surrender

under the weight of our history.

I have half my father’s years,

but twice my father’s fears in my follicles.

His first job he cut his hand for three dollars and sixty jiffies,

still his boss wouldn’t sweat the damage.

Heal with it, he said.

In New York, Dad couldn’t read

but spoke a sentence the length

of his strides across the desert highway.

“Window seat, no-smoking.”

Even then, on a plane with no money

nicotine had its price.

Yet I’ve the entire English language at my disposal

and still no vocal chords.

Porcelain I’s dotted neat spill from my teeth,

I speak white

—beneath, my R’s are rolled,

my thighs are pulled pork; I can’t coagulate.

Only smoke puts my Indian knees at ease; I’m short of death,

Searching for words in this foreign tongue and ancestral breath.