Faculty Writing: Two Poems
June 01, 2018
In the Winter/Spring 2018 issue of Fence are two poems by BISR faculty Anjuli Raza Kolb and Rebecca Ariel Porte. Kolb’s, entitled “Raat Ki Raani,” ponders double-edged freedom:
I’m free to think about
things like love
to hear the fast spring stream prancing
on her own grave and think
in Flint they have no
running water
and I’m a teacher who doesn’t teach there
Ariel Porte’s, sadly behind paywall, is titled “Pharmakon” (a drug that’s at once the poison and the cure) and includes, I can tell you, this arresting lyric:
Ontologists debate the loneliest whale,
whither whale, whether lonely,
& you in your corner with the murtherer’s pike, tipped in baleen,
shudder away from–hand, your hand, his hand, her hand, my hand?