https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Lament_Beginning_With_A_Line_From_Khaled_Mattawa.mp3

Lament Beginning With A Line From Khaled Mattawa

I have fallen into the embrace of my own rugged innocence
listener who suffers, in my innocence I’ve forgotten

language. I do not speak paths that make themselves
clear—follow me anyway. Burdock will catch your thigh,

hook the eye of your cotton weave, between two threads—
eye. There is the open place. Where burr sticks

any soft, vulnerable, membrane—please.
Please hear me.

I am inexperienced. Any photograph
is haunt. All through me.

A sun ray fell
across my shoulder. With a clang.

Hairs on my shoulders stand erect, hackles erect.
That’s what looking at these

faces with/held in screens do to make
my bones a singed wick and my muscle, my skin: flames.

There’s a mean sun. Daylight has many expectations.
I resist measurement. On the other hand

am impatient for forward progress, fruitful
change. I’ve lived seconds in the first year of my infant life.

I’ve been inside a thousand years in one day of grief.
How long will it take?


Lauren K. Carlson (Email: laurenkcarlson@gmail.com) is the author of the chapbook “Animals I Have Killed” and has an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Find her writing in publications such as Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Sojourners and The Windhover among others.

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