Erika Meitner & Philip Metres
Wednesday, November 6, 2019, 8:00 pm
Tickets

Marginalia

Of this place I choose the wind.
–Mahmoud Darwish

Your throne was
margin. Your voice

a ruin of Birwe,
the thrown

and the road.
What remains

of what you
walked on?

Of this place
you chose

the wind. Of
and of. Odysseus

and Scheherazade,
you woke

to morning inside
a suitcase. Yourself

and not yourself,
you are,

at last,
arced textures

housed in
our mouths.

You opened
the window,

all these rain
shards

our words.
You nearly

mastered
absence.

How dare
you die.

First appeared in New American Writing

Philip Metres

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (forthcoming 2020), The Sound of Listening (essays, 2018), Sand Opera (poems, 2015), Pictures at an Exhibition (poems, 2016), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (translations 2015), and others. His work has garnered a Lannan fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.http://www.philipmetres.com