issue 31: monsoon 2025

SARAH RIGGS

The debt of travel is seared into the postcolonial passageways like so many lost receipts. The dislocation allows for a plurality of possibilities, momentary severances that generate marked images, keen sounds, that are a call, not to responsibility in moral terms so much as a communion with the complexity of love and spirit, the one combination that though it cannot get us out of imbalance—out of debt—can generate energy for a species’ future that looks like it is foreclosing on itself—“we were keen to hear each other’s breath/ voices at play caught in the wind a bit/ civilizations fall on whispers”—and yet may not.

Tangier Reflections

a poet staring into mirrors of varying sizes

--Sara Elkamel

poems are hands and feet, eyes, lost eyes

--Safaa Fathy

rooftops    gulls laughing laughing

a band of musicians in the street (maybe a wedding)

a turtle’s foot on my toe

if you don’t like the wind, leave this town, says Safira

muse or music a numbing together

further inland some arguments

what was it you meant to hear?

a thousand birds raining down

an occult dream or memory

you were with them   they are with you

you recording the love

now comes the call to prayer

the voices in simultaneous surround

language is magic you say

feeling the registers in your gut

the sun coming down in stripes

I had sent you my eyes by what’s app

two seagulls perched on that roof

a smothering of engines for a moment

we were keen to hear each other’s breath

voices at play caught in the wind a bit

civilizations fall on the whispers

Her hair is different from mine says the 2-year-old

I am a lion I say and growl and make fists

She becomes a lion too, naked with little feet

the fans open and close 

you were a little device

and I a severed head

our hands were reading material for each other

you in line with an eye 

I had borrowed once

a sleeve or misnomer

several magpies (female) back in Paris in a garden

making noises  conferring  disagreeing

some spread eye

the hand of Fatima hanging by a necklace

and here again (is it calming?)

the call to prayer

all male voices (the differences)

routine voices fresh each time

a marvel or taste

mellifluous fractions of attention

gathered around for company

where was the Arabic at breakfast?

tonally deaf in the decaf

what were the characters the numbers again

a colonial pathology circumvented by a hum

(you too you too said the conscience)

along with the other selves in Tangier

to restore yourself into a whole toe or tree

locate that one there (we were made of each other)

drinking the citronade in a pearl of a mouth

she dreams the remorse

a huge box of madeleines for my father

nostalgia in quantity (she had gathered his attention)

and Cole would dip in every now and again

asking after wild animals or some kind of abandoned school

weaving through dream

a sly deterioration 

of the focus on women & beauty

blinding the beast to get at this equilibrium

Sarah Riggs is…