Hassam mapped out the world on the café tabletop
among thin glasses
of fresh mint tea
silver server of sugar syrup smiling
the old stone road led to the sea
“the world is this big” said he inscribing
a circle in the crumbs off my breakfast plate
“take me out of here please there is no hiding”
from the world unseen before
everyone has been to this café
small circle in the square of society
the vile Englishman in caftan bays
“I see you’ve met my little monkey”
everyone has seen this poem gliding
tender daughters’ slender sons into death-black SUV’s
down ancient roads to hotels shining
overlooking the silver sea
Hassam mapped out the world
on the café tabletop among thin glasses
of fresh mint tea
my heart fell dead before
*“my heart fell dead before” from All in Green Went My Love Riding by e.e. cummings. This poem is from the chapbook Nothing Happened Last Night by Karen Morris (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/nothing-happened-last-night-by-karen-morris/
Nothing Happened Last Night serves as a membrane for psychic contact. As in silent illumination, it speaks from the interstices between moments of longed-for values that bind existence, of impermanence, imperfection, and our indivisible interconnectedness. These are poems inscribed on the tissue thin skin of the back of our hands before we are born. They ask where our minds flew to last night, what of the unknown companions in our dreams. They bow but never break, honoring the eternal now.
Karen Morris is a poet and psychoanalyst in private practice in Montpelier, Vermont. She received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (NAAP, 2015) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press, PA). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including, NY Quarterly Magazine, Chiron Review, Writers Resist, Plainsongs, SWWIM Every Day, Paterson Literary Review. She is a volunteer public educator, Ambassador of Hope for Shared Hope International, concerning the impact of the commercial sex industry in global sex trafficking and sex tourism with children. She is a co-founder and transmitted lay teacher at Two Rivers Zen Community, an on-line practice community. http://www.tworiverszen.org
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