Before you, I slept on a bayonet.Bided my time in clothing. Neither experiencenor innocence kept mefrom bleeding. Before you, I heldan invisible sign: please touch this abyss.How pleasing to have you sieve methrough your lungs, leave me essentialdregs and seeds. Since there’s no placea grain of sand cannot hide, desertsand strands now travel the worldwith us, in shoes. Let me kind you in twotongues. Habibti, two decades ago,we fell off a cliff, each holding a wing,each holding a hand, and have yet to land.
Love Potion #42
Philip Metres
Feature Date
- January 3, 2024
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“Love Potion #42” from WE CALL TO THE EYE & THE NIGHT: edited by Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck.
Published by Persia Books on Sep 12, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Philip Metres.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Philip Metres is the author of Fugitive Refuge (2024), Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2023), Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening (2018), and other books. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has received the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is working for peace and justice for Palestine.
“In telling us what and how they love, these poets are telling us, in part, what is at stake.”
— Asian American Writer’s Workshop
“We Call to the Eye & the Night is an exciting new resource, granting access to a myriad of Arab writers writing in English today.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“The book does not attempt to survey living Arab writers, as past anthologies have done… Instead, Alyan and Hashem Beck have invited writers to an open celebration, a haflah or ’azumah, a place where they can be with other writers with whom they have this one thing in common, and to whom they don’t have to explain themselves… Where they can write about love, a supremely human and universal topic, however they want to.”
— Eman Quotah, The Markaz Review
“[We Call to the Eye & the Night] gives the reader the sensation of gazing into a brilliant night sky, one that is both familiar and strange… Some of the stars are familiar… while others have risen to join them in new constellations.”
—AL JADID
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