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 a poet, filmmaker, artist and translator, born in New York where she is now based, after having spent over a decade in Paris.
Before directing Six Lives: A Cinepoem, she produced The Tangier 8 at the Cinémathèque de Tanger in Morocco, which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and the Tate Modern Museum among other international venues.
She is the author of eight books of poetry in English: Waterwork (Chax, 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street, 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015) which won a 1913 poetry prize, Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle, fall 2021, Lines (forthcoming with Winter Editions, 2025). She is the author of the book of essays Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, & O’Hara (Routledge, 2002), and has translated and co-translated eight books of contemporary French poetry into English, including (not most recently) Etel Adnan’s TIME which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020.