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.