Never Describe the Sky as Azure BY PHILIP METRES unless it’s made of stone. لاجورد Lāzhward migrating from Persia, smuggled from Farsi to Arabic & thrown like a wingless bird across the sky-dark sea until its version spills from English mouths. Lapis lazuli. O trap of beauty, you are a fiction ... Exhausted at day’s end of an oven-summer I duck out of the house [...]
Ashberries: Letters BY PHILIP METRES 1. Outside, in a country with no word for outside, they cluster on trees, red bunches. I looked up ryabina, found mountain ash. No mountains here, just these berries cradled in yellow leaves. When I rise, you fall asleep. We barely know each other, you said on the phone last night. Today, sun brushes the wall like an empty canvas, voices from outside drift into this room. I can't translate—my words, frostbitten fingers. I tell no one, how your hands ghost over my back, letters I hold. 2. Reading children's stories by Tolstoy, Alyosha traces his index over the alphabet [...]
