Writing in Place is a column in which authors published in our print and web pages tell us about their writing spaces.
I write in a glass-sided room, an addition to a 1950s brick bungalow, southern style. From the threshold that once led to the outdoors, it’s just one giant stride to my desk: space enough to tap at a keyboard, or lie down; for books and papers to breed, but not for dancing (a tiny tango when someone says yes).
When I vomit
it will be through my forehead.
Be warned, stand far off
because the vomit will not spare you.
By KAREN PRESS
So we’re monads after all,
that’s a relief, complete and separate
and also connected to every other agglomeration of fundamental particles
(aka pine cone, parking meter, vodka orange)
we’ve ever touched however tangentially,
boson from a breath of Plato’s used air
gone two millennia later into the feather of a chicken in Mumbai,
air I exhale full of fermions from the fourth king of Axum’s coronation dinner,
so that if you read any electron’s palm now you can tell
what it will be feeling in 4005.
By KAREN PRESS
1
A relief supply ship for the bombed citizens of Iraq
called Sir Galahad
arrives tomorrow in the port of Basra.
Oh where is the beautiful lady
who will come out of the charred crowd
to lay her long hair along the shore
and wave the green scarf of welcome?
There is a stain on the horizon.
It leaks into the world, covers
the linens, covers the faces
and turns this ocean, shuddering,
from its course.
On occasion, the animals
curl into themselves, their skins,
and we—not knowing why—
put our faces to the wind
and sniff.
from Imprendehora
Do not say “I hear the laughter of birds
above our heads.” Say, it is the laughter
of women who empty their washbasins
on the steps of very high houses
whose walls, they say,
can never be cleaned.
By ARI SITAS
from Around the World in Eighty Days: The India Section
It was important to have a conversation with
Pandit Nehru in Allahabad
After the visitors left the fine house
We sat down for tea
Overlooking the confluence of the sacred rivers
I marveled at the variety of trees
By KELWYN SOLE
Don’t trust any harbour. Already
those reflections that match each boat
turn restless, yearn to fracture:
each wave beyond the quay dishevels.
By KELWYN SOLE
Autumn works away like a carpenter
dismantling the promises of spring—
our shelters brought so slowly down
it’s hard to recollect when each wall
fell, foretell when each corrupt plank
will crumble.
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