Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected three poems by Amish Trivedi for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
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Dóra Maurer, “Tracing Space I, Tracing Space II, and Plan” (1979) (detail), gelatin silver prints on cardboard and graphite on paper, currently featured in ‘Transmissions’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (photo by Elisa Wouk Almino for Hyperallergic)
Leaving by Midnight
The heroes of
someone else’s childhood
are dying
in bathtubs and
on the floor between
the bed and the other
woman that came in after
the first one left. Another
stopping that begins
again, refreshed. The world
has come to be unreal to
me. A heart that double-
times, an anxiety
hammer: I like
the silt to fit
around me and
become somebody’s
nerve, a body
revolting.
A Painting
Beneath a
wave but
not drowning be-
cause of, an unrehearsed
society. Some
places are always
reeling from
disasters (first person,
second person: boot
strap). If
standing a-
gainst a
wall is
everyone’s idea
of heaven, we’re
always there again. Our
terror was not
knowing
when to let the quiet
win.
Couvade
Unfeeling is
everything. In our
atelier, we build
things, learn songs by
heart, escape to anywhere
we don’t want to
belong. Sympathy
reigns on us fully. I
never loved nobody with
a foot hovering above.
What is it to know pain
as it seeps into the pavement
and renews itself as a
victim and not a
curse? Like Tylor, a brushing
of nausea, hatching. To be
given the same bed and
warm hand
upon the head lends moment
to mimicry, a way to sit and
do nothing at all. From an
unslept bed, we wander
around the house.
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Amish Trivedi is the author of Sound/Chest (Coven Press), numerous chapbooks, and has poems in Kenyon Review Online, New American Writing, The Laurel Review, plus other places. His reviews can be found in such journals as Pleiades, Sink, and Jacket2. He has an MFA from Brown University and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Illinois State University.
