Soraya

1.

 

Excluding pork, shellfish, milk, and rattan,

we rationalize tanagers tanning in the tonga, 

Soraya, tam tam rousing gravid tamagotchi.

I collect utility knives vaccinating me against

mare clausum, nocturnal black margates slow

off the mark against marsh gas, chilling us to

our marrow when we schedule the schlubs.

(Statistics bear out subglacial suffragism.)

In our three-day truce, Soraya, trudging past

tropics of trumpet vines, umber encryptions

endear us to the bricolage of painted junk. 

I open wide the breviary at the bridge of 

sighs, brewmaster to ingravascent ingénues,

inhuming red admirals in sedilia sediment.

Anis Shivani is the author of My Tranquil War and Other Poems, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (2012), Against the Workshop (2011), Anatolia and Other Stories (2009), and the forthcoming novel Karachi Raj (2013). He is writing a novel called Abruzzi, 1936, and a new book of criticism exploring plastic realism in American novels of the last decade. His work appears in many leading journals like Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Agni, London Magazine, Meanjin, Fiddlehead, Dalhousie Review and others.