portion of the artwork for Issam Zineh's poetry

Saturday in Four Parts, With Distance and Equivocation
Issam Zineh

| Notice Three Things Today |

a streetlamp on at dawn; an
animal skull; a plastic bag


| In the Museum |

I’m alone, she says, with the kind
of abandon—is it that?—of a child
seeing a 17th-century collection
of art and rarity for the first time,
and without her father here to say,
“Come closer. Look, notice the overlapping
lacquered leather of this Japanese
armor,” or her mother in the chamber
of wonders imploring, “Of the purple-
spotted swallowtail, the pink-checked
cattleheart, or the Grecian sulphur,
which is your favorite?”
African moon.


| Tomorrow Is a Full Moon |

We could call it obsession.
How you remind me

about the coming of this moon
or that. I haven’t forgotten. I know

raw light, know crow is an alias—
worm and sap, so suitable.

We could call it terror.
We could call it obligation.


| On Being Asked Whether
All Lives Matter |

There’s an unaccustomed we
that sees what lies behind the
here and the now of the heron’s
purposeful strike. I crane my neck
toward the slightest unfamiliar sound.
This is how we have come to know
boundary as simply a form of statute.
The question comes from just beyond
an edge of field on fire. All or none.

                                        And then none.


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FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 56 | Fall/Winter 2020