The Poetry Project

Publications > The Poetry Project Newsletter > #280 – Spring 2025

Two Poems

Sol Cabrini

How can this be the world?

To the formless formation of rubble, the timeless timely ash leaning its weight against oxygen’s good-bye. Call it architecture’s divorce, the chapel split from its prayers, each breathless psalm a dialect—the tongue of collapse never rests.

How can this be world?

To the language of heart failure, where arteries conjugate verbs like “rupture” and “clog.” Pulse is a stutter in the sentence of the flesh. Diastole delays its comma, while systole forgets where to place the period.

How can this be world?

To the cardiac love that loses other after other, each disappearance a syllable torn from the book of ears. Touch flickers—a bad bulb. You call it mourning; it calls you nothing. What alphabet can outlast erosion?

How can this be world?

To the sky and its cellphones that never dial some of those below the sun back into waking. What did the sky miss while it scrolled? Do clouds archive or delete propaganda? Sunrise burns, but it never backspaces.

How can this be world?

To the canvas of an annual annihilation, where the seasons paint in subtraction, the fall subtracts color, winter subtracts motion, spring—a cruel revision of what has already fled us. Summer, the lie that warmth has already returned.

How can this be world?

To the death required for a world power to be a world power, where crowns are suited in coffins first. The blueprint for empire is cross-eyed in wounds of those who never signed up for the draft—a pouring rainfall call it a blood currency, and watch who spends it.

How can this be world?

On earth that is spinning and spilling all of you. To the demolition of memory on the premise of no “longer many.” Names split into fractions, fractal names rebranded as static, what was once “them” now “nobody” at all. Archive unarchived, the ledger is never zeroed, just decimalized.

How can this be world?

To all that life that is vivid, so vivid that it forecasts its own slaughter—foresight, an obscenity—the clairvoyance of seeing your name already inscribed on the teeth of tomorrow—a perpetual immemorial immersion—the rhythm of the body’s repetitions, brutal and reprised, a laugh that breaks itself into excursion a chuckle echoing through the spine’s corridors like a loose bottle rolling beneath a ship’s deck.

How can this be world?

To the pile of laughter that can no longer digest the passage of air it once fed to the hearts of its leftovers. Ribs are tired of being string instruments. Laughter is an aftertaste, micro-intervals to the grit of something caught between the teeth that plays the harmony of life out its tombs.

How can this be world?

To the familiar depth of peculiar intimate breath, spurting out more language which denies mouth to speak to the ear, year after year, until breath is not a greeting but an exhale of refusal. Air, too, can be made into protest. Listen close—the lungs hold more revolutions than lungs should.

How can this be world?

To the proclamation of an internationalization so perverse in its course of money.
Capital migrates like swans, seasonal movements predictable but never clipped wings. The border always opens for currency, but never for you.

How can this be world?

To the racialism of acceptance’s deception—the corpse that must stand in one's place. Alienated in its midst, the solidified reminder that one exists, or did persist. The substitution is so subtle—the replacement so quiet the reverb still believes they belong to the verbs of you.

How can this be world?

This world, a factory for unmaking, a furnace that filters where you burn just enough to glow but never flame. This world, a name whispered into a crayon where the only answer is your own distorted voice colored back as evidence that you were once empty to yourself.

This must be world.
How can this be

For my muda

The gut unsings—words converted backward, an arrangement swallowed by breath, misplaced punctuation st utt .er s. Dust commas the expression of air, halts. Meaning evaporates mid-breath, lingering like the scent of old smoke. Seductive sounds are clouds, unwinged heart beatings—“on,” “through,” “beside,” beneath a sky lynched by echoes. I was trying to catch a vibe last lost night, a rhythm that un rave le d i tself at the edg e of a close g host h ost, a phantom wisdom flickering its spasms into embers.

The subject acts in smoke, lit or flown aflame afloat, an apparition or signal blurred by rising heat. I’m a fragment arising out of that sentence of my father and aunties who had been to prison, change of direction through bars, life parsed into broken clauses, collective silences.

The power of speeches’ parole per role, each iteration caging its own grammar, deep creases of a cloud blending sky in to paint, a palette of ash, blue notes, cigarettes, gin and juice. The open eye phonography contrasting, a queer witness to light breaking against the trans curvature of words. I was just trying to call your number properly, the digits scattered by static, a longing without firm prepositions, a philosophy of mis steps. I can’t capable, too culpable to the gutted insides of buildings,

With their bricks humming hymns of dirges backward into phrases.

On backs that b lack like Grand pa, on tracks that train like Great-grand pa, iron b ending to memory, rails choreo graph ing the weight of inheritance. I come from a family of constructions, work ing, Detroit hustling rebuttals of Tennessee-Virginian-Barbadian clouds, their steel spines re-fusing the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean

With the air of the Indies’ blood after blood, a lineage of birds carried by tides, Carrington after Carrington Brathwaite to Kamau each wave slaving, erasing and rewriting the shoreline of who we are or where.

#280 – Spring 2025