Subscribe now for our Labor Day deal! The code Flashback24 wipes away inflation, this weekend only.

Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper

How quickly the faces avert themselves, the red light gleaming in the corner
where it was where I was not looking.

Now I know why frogs came and collected themselves in my chambers,
making travel music in their throats.

Each rock contains a powder, and stars are dark, just underneath their skins.
The lump is discovery awaiting.

Today there was a film of the grass to see, and when it was made. The Continental
passed it with its strange winged doors.

Twice. I kept gluing myself to feathers, and every other foolish and delicate thing
that smelled like forever.

My face swells a passport. I take sugar without my tea, I tell the attendant.
Eyes don’t age, she says.

Roman numerals, you ask of me, can you read them? No I say, I cannot read
them, before I say, Yes, yes I can.

Published: | Online 2006

Theodore Worozbyt

Theodore Worozbyt is the author of the chapbook A Unified Theory of Light, published by Dream Horse Press, and a full-length collection, The Dauber Wings, winner of the first American Poetry Journal Book Prize, which will be released in early 2007. New work appears in CrazyhorseImageMargieNew England ReviewNoon: The Journal of the Short PoemNorth American ReviewParis/Atlantic JournalPloughsharesPoetry, Poetry DailyThe Southern Review, and Verse Daily. (updated 11/2006)

Back to top