my mind makes for me a window then a door

Asiya Wadud

makes for me marrow or an inside filamentfigment or sepulcher sculpture monument or inside cave slips of windowpanes—yawning at the seams                or permanent fixture green lathe or marrow or nested            an interior door ajar though mesh so more sieve than door nest of open win-                  dows does the mesh make                              a structured or strident city grid meets girth meets exurb                            the monument makes for me a relic or fixture a fixture then plaque                            gilded and scapula, evergreen aseptic gaps could the flowers make  my mange makes for me a dinner, softened inside any gilded mouth            mostly cavity or crown            bridge or gully            a monument to marrow and what runs inside it, oxygen to further a future                                                                                                         stove top or otherwise                                                                                                            step inside or at the hem             my manager gathers the marriage of order of alliums and almost and                  soft cells and tender and tender and strident the window  my mind makes for me marrow or filigreethe intricacies delivered by the minutethe marrow creates and feeds a steady streamboth a summer and a selfless seasonsilent or apparition or the noise could speak all brackish and wovenwarp weft and still lifeeach a degree of the aperturemy mind makes for me a thin, tame vinesettling into its tangled ropewoven up inside the cavernous glass tubesclimbing up the facadethen inside through a pitched roof windowwhat workwhat worth                                              my mind makes for me a window,                                                    brushstroke, or way out                                            scraping back gold filament                                            door or otherwise a fixture or otherwise filmed futures

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Asiya Wadud is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her writing has been published in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, Poetry, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and Beirut Arts Center, among others. Wadud lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and Columbia University.

Cover of Mandible Wishbone Solvent

Chicago, Illinois

University of Chicago

"A grueling yet gratifying must-read . . . Mandible Wishbone Solvent is a wonderfully confusing yet revolutionary read, despite its mere 88 pages. . . Wadud creatively combines visual art, poetry, and prose while always granting each element its own space to shine."
Harvard Crimson

“Wadud’s astounding new poems—many of them ekphrastic, all of them rigorously intricate, supersaturated—come across to me as both hard-edged and liminal. Enacting the dynamic relationship between figure and ground, center and edge, they frame the constant unfolding of meaning’s dimensions, its reverberations.”
—Mónica de la Torre, author of Repetition Nineteen

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