> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # One Poem by Ari Banias - URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-ari-banias/ - Published: 2018-05-09T11:00:53.000Z - Updated: 2025-11-24T16:25:09.000Z - Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Ari Banias for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers. - Author: Wendy Xu - Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/ap_rivers_2007.jpg) Maren Hassinger, “Rivers” (2007), ink on paper, framed: 14 1/4 x 13 1/4 x 1 1/4 inches (image courtesy the artist and the Baltimore Museum of Art) ## QUALM Iridescent green flies on the dog shit scatter when I walk by. I’ve never seen flies so vivid. Gorgeous, these shit-flies. Someone sits on a park bench with head in hands. A plot of ornamental grasses bends in resigned unison. Helicopters overhead, how they move like spirits with no conscience. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Patience. Rage and being told “be patient.” The birds with orange heads and dust-colored bodies bob on the powerlines. The poet explains *a patient* is “one who suffers.” Beneath the underpass, a chair overturned in the fenced-in weeds toward which a misplaced tenderness arises. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Each night, she says, and most mornings, refugees arrive. Then ship off to Athens. Why would they want to stay, there’s nothing here. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Fog descended from the Pacific; I took a bath with my biggest rock. A deity, ancient, severe, rolling around in the bottom of the tub. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Nothing: a bookstore, a lotto place run by cousins, two bakeries, one university, donated used baby clothes well-meaningly folded and stacked, one detention center in the capital road sign with the capital’s distance in kilometers spray painted FUCK ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Where one bright aperture in the cloud has closed up inner tubes and shoes and life vests on the shore. My mother lives above this beach. She watches them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) After being asked for money by five separate people an office supply truck passes, GIVE SOMETHING BACK across it. I give five dollars to Ceci. I gave two dollars to someone earlier, but he seemed disappointed. I sit on a sunny curb in the parking lot, feeling useless, like a teenager. Ha, who is American! my mother asks bitterly. One of us looks down at the other. Palm tree in the distance with the hair of a rocker dude. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) My mother said fight. She said they used to call her “the little Spañola.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Photographs of water, like case studies. How far away from yourself would you say you get? When I swim the first time, I cannot call it pleasure. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) ‘Them’ here feels violent to me. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Three kids in the chilly light of a convenience store’s back entrance visible from the highway between one California and another. One squats looking at a phone, two lean and smoke. Slouch of interminable suburbia interminable crap-jobs at fifteen a flash, momentary as toward the city we continue. As we do. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) Four old paint drips on the windowpane I look at, not through. Four old punctuation marks a nearing helicopter cuts across. I refuse to detail the humiliations that keep me up at night. I am pulling a blanket over my head. Or, I’m elated by 30 seconds of rain. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/screen-shot-2018-05-07-at-3-13-04-pm.png) At the laundromat churchlike, fastidiously polite, I pair socks at the high counter, plastic marbled to resemble marble black, white, and blue. A woman claims a whole row of washers spacing five hefty trash bags at even intervals, looking tired. Here our delicates. I sit down she gets up. A stranger I want to convey kindness to. The day opens like a compact, mirror on one side powder on the other. \* \* \* Ari Banias is the author of [*Anybody*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393247791/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) *(*W.W. Norton, 2016). Ari lives in Berkeley, CA, where he teaches poetry and works with small press books.