Search All Winners

As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.

Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged

with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered

for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,

cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love

the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.

Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles

to the inferred shoreline.

People in the street referred to her as al-tarsha, the deaf woman, and, among the Arabs in the marketplace, everyone and everything in her household was known in elation to the tarsha: the deaf woman’s father, the deaf woman’s home, her maid, her bicycle, her car, her husband. The motorcycle with which she had won an exhibition race on the Corniche in the early forties and which was later sold to a neighbor continued to be known as the tarsha’s mutusikl. When I was old enough to walk alone on the streets of Ibrahimieh, I discovered that I too was known as the tarsha’s son.

When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.

In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,

the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case

of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.

He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,

the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago

love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.

His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange

to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street

in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower

the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph

languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind

into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand

brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,

the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting

a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,

around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs

through the road. The road which runs through

the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother

only in that she is a story the Archivist tells

himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,

two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.

The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.

Of course, the village burns again. History is

the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter

is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!

The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.

but we are still at sea     we climbed into the rocking

boat again     the things that we could not afford

to remember in the vernacular      

                                                                       sun

                                                            sinking backwards into the world’s

                                                            light industry    Eros in idle hands