Anis Shivani

Anis Shivani
 
Light and Space
 
Aspens have shed their morning light:
in medias res Hercules has ascended to
grip the father’s ankles, wrestle him
down to the ground, where layers of fungi
arrest the bottle-broken sun. Daughters
drink the winter air in all good conscience,
Mexican arias fly off to oven smiles.
 
 
 
Anis Shivani’s books include Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, Karachi Raj: A Novel, Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems, and Soraya: Sonnets. Books forthcoming in 2016 include Both Sides of the Divide: Observing the Sublime and the Mundane in Contemporary Writing and the novel A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. Anis’s work appears recently in Western Humanities Review, New Letters, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, AGNI, and elsewhere. The poems here are from a recently finished manuscript called The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours.