The
Bodies Saeed Jones Selected Poems
The theme of these poems is to reveal tragedies. The selected poems of Saeed Jones express both of its soft beauty and its tragic violence, which are contradicting subjects yet delicately twisted together. Saeed unexpectedly reveals a story that has tendency of violence by his use of beautiful words that describes soft, delicate, sweet and slow. Therefore, the concept of water and fluidity is expressed to show unexpected dramatic movements of the poems that are controlled through quiet and slow expression of the word. The concept also resembles the uprising of the ‘bodies’ to tell their unspoken tragic stories, and gives the readers a chance to reveal their deep stories as the readers flip through the pages of this book. -Abigail Kim-
Scheherazade Sleeps Through the Executions Aubade 1: The Poet Puts a Gun to Scheherazade’s Head
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2: The Poet’s Revolver Opens Its Mouth
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3: Over Them, Scheherazade’s Shawl Unfurls
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Nocturne: Beheaded
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Scheherazade Sleeps Through Executions
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There are so many rooms inside her & just as many locked doors, but sometimes
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when the silence snaps shut, she hears the soft thud.
Another body falling onto the white marble floor of her sleep.
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All night they fall.
She doesn’t remember when the bodies started disappearing from their lives & arriving inside her,
gagged & hooded,
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but she wakes a little heavier each morning,
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a night’s worth of bullet casings tangled in her hair.
The King
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just now easing back into bed beside her.
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Aubade
Two blind-folded men try to waltz on the tips of their toes. White shirts full of breeze, hands behind their backs. Polite partners.
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The wind calls out each step and,
necks noosed, they spin.
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Weak scaffold creaking as they turn toward the crowd, heads tilted at the angle of spasm. 16
Lover,
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there is no one left to tell us who we are this morning.
The bodies, the bright smiles of the guards, the men still in bed who hear that same wind and let it rake their sleep.
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The Poet Puts a Gun to Scheherazade’s Head
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& says Tell me where he put the bodies.
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Or, that’s what he means to say,
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except nerves have made an open grave of his mouth & the hand holding the gun won’t stop shaking.
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He telegraphs his question against the old woman’s temple with a tap-ta-tap-tap from his trembling gun.
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This woman, long used to the demands of desperate men with stuttering hands, hears the question rapping against her skin & looks out past the poet. 26
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A night sky shot through with stars.
Tap-ta-tap-tap
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asks the poet again because he thinks she didn’t understand.
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One last look at the sky & its dead gods.
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We are, she sighs. We are the bodies.
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The Poet’s Revolver Opens Its Mouth
& Scheherazade falls as if struck by a sudden need to pray.
She sinks through the smell of smoke & (the poet swears) there is an hour between her body & the dirt. 35
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Enough time for the wind to tighten its grip on her shawl & promise not to let go. Like a son rushing to his mother’s stumble,
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the poet catches her as if his arms are the prayer’s answer & when her knees meet the earth
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so do his. The gun still in his hand, he holds her as if the dead woman will tell him what to do next. 40
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Over Them, Scheherazade’s Shawl Unfurls
& the poet doesn’t look up to see it become a black silk bruise on the breeze, then – still unseen – the silhouette of a mourner’s body.
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Ersatz, standing without feet,
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the wind’s idea of a woman, rapt with silence. With a shudder,
she sighs out of her self & is a reaper is a sail is an unhinged wing in search of its crow.
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Nocturne: Beheaded
for Thapleo Makutle All throat now already brighter than the stars. I could hold you in my song.
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Sotto voce, tremble against me: a breeze slips in, cools my blood to garnet bed stained with stones, cold and finally useless.
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I Orpheo, I lyre. Down river, even damned with hum, there is room for your cry in my mouth. Sweet, sweet sotto voce, I sang your moan until the machete swung then I kept singing.
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I eyeless, I eternal. The guards hold blades to the sky and cut the dark open. Do you hear me raining from the wound?
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My tongue is a kingdom. You live there.
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Special thanks to my amazing Olga Mezhibovskaya and Saeed Jones.
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