Footnotes in the order of disappearance Poems

Poet, translator, and physician Joudah (Textu) balances cool scientific precision with exceptional openness to mystery and awe in keenly lyrical poems offset by occasional jolts of irony. For Joudah, questions of mortality pervade the daily terrain that he traverses in his writing. As a medical student in anatomy lab, he notes, "I had come across that which will end me, ex-/ tend me, at least once, without knowing it." Such heightened awareness of human vulnerability suffuses Joudah's sensibility and informs his approach to all subject matter, which includes considerations of war and displacement, as well as tender exchanges between lovers. There is also playfulness in how Joudah turns the material of contemporary life toward timeless qualities of being: "our polymers of I skipping/ their archipelago stones// Your touchscreen/ my ringtone heart." Interdependence is evident everywhere, as is the knowledge that "A body exits all pages to be/ inscribed on another, itself." From this place of shared fragility, Joudah asks, "Sweet clot/ of wakefulness, what is Mercy?" He answers his own question: "To go mad among the mad/ or go it alone." Joudah's collection is testament to another state of being in which each poem is an occasion to be awake to the world with clarity and compassion. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Progress Notes The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty is symmetry so rare it's a mystery. My left eye is smaller than my right, my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly aligned like Muslims in prayer. My lips an accordion. Each sneeze a facial thumbprint. One corner of my mouth hangs downward when I want to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell's palsy perhaps or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting, that a doctor's unable to look upon the blush in a young beauty's face without thinking it could be a fever, a malar rash, a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie facedown now as cadavers posed on first anatomy lesson? I didn't know mine was a woman until three weeks later we turned her over. Out of reverence there was to be no untimely exposure of donors, our patrons who were covered in patches of scrubs-green dish towels, and by semester's end we were sick of all that, tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts into lab air and caught them. My body was Margaret. That's what the death certificate said when it was released before finals. The cause of her death? Nothing memorable, frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit were there skull cracks to condemn the house of death, no shattered glass in the brain, only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely. He had the most beautiful muscles of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged, zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred. Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling had cloth over their eyes as if they'd just been executed. Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance, he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war. I had come across that which will end me, extend me, at least once, without knowing it. *** Plethora About the praise I dish your way jail's the comeuppance of a liar poet My only want is your content and if I hold another want may I never be granted it Each full moon is born of a crescent yet what's a full moon got? Vitiligo and the morning sees me with eyes of dew a fever breaking out on your integument On your skin exanthem is a pasture of anemones Because you're one of them I love my enemies *** Epithalamion We hold the present responsible for my hand in your hand, my thumb as aspirin leaves a painless bruise, our youth immemorial in a wormhole for silence to rescue us, the heart free at last of the tongue (the dream, the road) upon which our hours reside together alone, that this is love's profession, our scents on pillows displace our alphabet to grass with fidelity around our wrists and breastbones, thistle and heather. And this steady light, angular through the window, is no amulet to store in a dog-eared book. A body exits all pages to be inscribed on another, itself. Excerpted from Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems by Fady Joudah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.