CENTO

I was the young girl with moon lipstick
on the scooter
I was breaking eggs everywhere.

I yelled NA SA REALI KO
because I saw it in movies
and it was my mother tongue.

I made a cookbook for my mothers.
I couldn’t see the date and then I could.
It meant that I was seventeen
and I was trying to cook for everyone.

I said rich-mond
because I was new to this country.
I picked up a melon and I was confused
because I said to it Asian faces.
I said he’s dead and there is no justice
and I get that there maybe never can be
but there is a lot of anger.

And I threw the melon.

I was finishing a tedious task.
I was correcting grammar,
or weaving a shawl,
or peeling a thousand parsnips.

Because I could.
Because my life could depend on it.
I was dancing by myself on the dance floor
with the remnants of my work
around me and everyone even
my one beloved family was gone.

I said look you are at the center of it and I
traced the center spindle of the dancing floor.
But I was alone.

What hurt most was that my mother
was in the car and I thought that she
was going to leave me but I wasn’t sure.
I saw the small likeness of a mother
floating in a river.
I heard my sister say
on the phone it’s not right how they did that
and her voice was breaking.

—Sarah Gambito

Copyright © 2017 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

TIRESIAS SEES MORE

What do you see?
Bunch of bright kids with shitty jobs and tacked up photographs of everybody’s teeth. Everybody’s teeth in rows on the wall. Everybody smudged in rows. Piles of their watches. Bits of toast in the butter from the knife, the knife and leaves and vessels failing. Children falling and scaling broken walls and catching buckshot with the holes it makes in their bodies. Like a finger pressing seed into dirt, over and over and over.

What do you see?
Flotsam and jetsam and broken bits of ship. A few drowning and many drowned, floating like oranges. Nets cast to gather the bodies in piles, letting them dry in the sun before setting them on fire.

Tell me something useful. What do you see?
An arm, a net, a spell, a role. Things that can be cast. A bearded god not with a book but a bar tab. A nest and a wooden owl, lips blowing life into things and clouds. It’s the same, only more so: fires in new places, everybody smudged.

What do you see?
It’s the same only more so. Men using machines for fun and for killing. The machines getting smaller and learning to see. You continue to harm. You watch it on the small screen of your small machine. You watch what you’ve done on your small machine. And when you’re done you put your small machine into your pocket. Because you like it. You like being watched.

—Michael Hurley

Copyright © 2017 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

HEMATOLOGICAL

in the lab waiting room

Romeo… They look around— Romeo?
Where had he gone? The blood
they needed was in him, but where
was he? Where’s Julie to ask?
But we knew when they’d find him
he’d earn a little bruise, hyacinth
and chartreuse, in the elbow’s fold. 
We fasted for it. Simple procedure,
so we summon you, Romeo. How
the young technician Adam
calls for you. Time will come
he’ll substitute silence for your name,
put a halt to this waiting-room game. 
Our turn comes all the sooner
with you in absentia. Your needle fear,
for sure. You slink away, curly cornmeal
ball of a man, not red meat. 
Sometimes they have to search, try twice,
even more, but go ahead, go through the door;
let them draw what flows in you,
what runs beneath your skin,
Tigris, Euphrates, Tiber, Po, Mississippi.
They circulate back home:
Columbia, Johnson Creek, Crystal Spring,
your own little pint.

—Sandra McPherson

Copyright © 2017 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.