1 poem
by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
Anjuli is a scholar, poet, and translator who lives in Harlem and the Berkshires. She teaches postcolonial literature and theory at Williams College, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and occasionally at City College. She is working on two books: an academic monograph about the colonial epidemic roots of contemporary Islamophobia and a collection of poems after the Urdu poet Iqbal called Janaab-e Shikvah (Watchqueen). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bennington Review, Public Pool, FENCE, Guernica, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BookForum, Reality Beach, and more.
Colors
This fucker moon has my death
coiled in her
Lashes it out in the middle
of absurdity hour
Proboscis, fast snake
wicking my eye corners
small throttling
through nape furrest
These houses are so close to the road
a dog would die
if it came running out
And this opal sky is pretty
but peachy
in the itchy river
it makes me want to
kill myself
To be cloud or cloudy?
he assumes
I guess probably
I bleat, childless
Well water named and thirst has been
my adequate companion
She too wines tunes around
my golden death
This fucker moon in gaudy sky
is vernal and has
my death in a coil
shakes it slack onto
the slithering night road
Snow melt and wood
things rotting
Thirsty earth waking up
and I’ll never eat
or drink again
Old lavender sentiment
that doesn’t scare me anymore
Old flamingo cloud
that drowns quick