Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Sandra Lim.
Asiya Wadud
all the badnesses delivered to our vessel:

                1. burned retinas
                2. death of our firstborn
                3. submergence in the water
                4. abandonment
                5. denied food and beverage

this is violence no shame reconciles
do not now implore our remittance


 


we don't know the provenance
of our own materiality
but we thought us luminous in that
we were each born under the
fabled light of some stars

the siege gripped us
miraculously

and anyone who is living is living,
is living


Author's Note

On the morning of March 27th, 2011, 72 people fled Tripoli on an inflatable boat, expecting to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. Instead, though, their boat ran out of fuel and rather than being rescued by one of the many vessels in these highly surveilled waters, the boat drifted for 14 days until all but 11 of the passengers perished. Survivors recount various points of contact with the external world during their ordeal, such as a military helicopter lowering a few packets of biscuits and bottles of water. No vessel chose to provide any assistance whatsoever to the passengers. The events, as recounted by those aboard the Left-to-Die Boat, appeared to constitute a severe violation of the legal obligation to provide assistance to any person in distress at sea.
 

̂̃ Forensic Architecture

from the book SYNCOPE /Ugly Ducking Presse
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Exterior wide shot of Ishmael Reed
Writing for a Global Audience: An Interview with Poet Ishmael Reed

"Well, I think that my greatest accomplishment was going global, so I don’t get hemmed in by the white media’s choosing of one Black artist at a time. Powerful white media have been imposing tokens on the Black writing scene for over a hundred years. Right now it’s bourgeois feminism, or powerful neocon interests like The Atlantic and The New Republic."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Vahni Capildeo on Martin Carter’s “This Is the Dark Time My Love”


“When did you—when does anyone—start writing poetry; or, when would you call the things, the scribbles, the utterances that you make or break, 'poetry?' When they are very young, a lot of people make up rhymes, or become attached to reciting mundane or magical-seeming phrases. Children may take pleasure in exclamations, swear words, and other fragments collaged from the grown-up world of overheard speech. If those contain the early sparks of poetry, for many Caribbean readers Martin Carter is a contributor to the flame."
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