Khashoggi

Khashoggi

Remember, reader, if ever in the mountains

you were trapped in fog & could not see

except as moles do, through their eyelids

— Dante, Purgatorio, tr. Robert Hollander

Lights out, tucked in bed I re-live

Khashoggi’s last moments. He’s come

for paperwork in order to marry Hatice.

Goons put out his eyes, one severs

his fingers, or is it his hands? Blood pools.

He knows now he’s a dead man. Another

cuts out his tongue — no. This one

is my death. This can happen

to anyone. This is the brutal world

we humans make. Leaders license torture

mutilation & death — it's how they rule.

My eyes, fingers, hands. My tongue.

Dismemberment merely requires the proper

tools. You or I can do it if we choose.

The Dream of the Architect [excerpt]
by Joan Murray

THE CIVILIAN

While you were pricking out the strange blue plan, I was
dancing an awkward step toward the future of man.
Dancing the confusion and eruption alone,
Making sound with my bones, with my feet stamping the
one
Drum over and over again without end.
The demand of doing well the bad would send
Me into a more than bitterness, into a very fatherhood of
action.
Alert white forms stood by at every crumpled stair to
sanction
The dying to carry the dead to the burial lands,
The wet shores where the waves bear out the lovers of
earth in their hands.
There were sea gulls whenever the storms came over the
water,
To inundate the restless places and the timeless sleeper.
The widows that gathered from the cities knelt there.
The sea gulls and the wives, the girls and the women
without sons,
Their eyes on the horizon for invasion or turned to the
farther channels
Of the sea,
Were immutable in their cold austerity
And yet, the few heard wings. The gulls beyond the rotting
nets
Where the fisherman now gathers and lets
His sleek imaginary catch fall to the deck in that pale under
water made the stir.
If you cannot name images or touch the shrill night crier,
Why fold hands together or shake tears from sockets warm
with fact?
O yes, the dreadful angels have their symbol in some
human act,
The pillar of fire takes on the soft young lad,
The witch and evil have their symbols in the ruling mad.