Anis Shivani

Anis Shivani
 
City: I
 
curving to the frail edge
washerwoman of the sun
mind your own matter
 
said baby carriage
rolling down a slope
gathers hummus of love
 
crisp cake baked
in the tender eye of laziness
for florid spare moments
 
in an office patterned
after mauve fishbaskets
sunlight arrows truth
 
a teacher in a cup
of not-sorrow, drunk
in burnt Quixote suds
 
I find you palpating hearts
on the discarded tram
running on foolish electricity
 
the cinema is free
a bare auditorium of life
as it was in the caves
 
the afternoon is art
turned on its head
slowly the muscles easing
 
to love like tigers in garages
floating like boxes of the future
zookeepers are locked shut
 
a boy and a girl in blue
chase the stone football
ballerinas in the nude
 
 
 
 
a free telescope
wedged between floating libraries
a home made of whispers
 
 
 
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.