After Oslo
Behind the old battles, calls for uni-national
sovereignty, peace is the initiative, after factional
alliances spin their wheels and come to grief
that having no alternative will better your beliefs
more than any New York Times or BBC,
Anti-Defamation or Arab League or national unity
government, or, for that matter, you and me.
Not believing in heaven, but in eternity
makes it easier to conceive, or concede
there are more interpretations than we need,
heartbreak to spare: children without heads,
women without legs, the routine of blood-red
sunsets over settlements, refugees.
Seen from Europe, Gaza shares Tel Aviv’s
horizon; from Jordan, the view is a river
rimmed with mines, a natural border of silver
water. In between the sea and the river, orange
groves line up their soldiers, mobs lynch
whoever they pull over, and nations
pull out their embassies. No patience
for Oslo; streets are no safer.
Real countries do not exist on paper.
Shopping for Volcanic Bread at the Greenmarket
Morning thick with smoked trout and pretzels
in red canisters, wild roses
slanted over the lips of green buckets, purple-shaded
Macintosh, Empire, Macoun.
Checkerboard dazzle: bouquets of radishes
flanked by pumpkin and purple cabbage.
We also wait to be bought. At dusk,
vendors undersell themselves.
Do we buy for cheap what we never needed—
organic spelt, corn relish
made four ways, pinwheels of volcanic bread?
It’s a global market, we parrot,
as if the principal rules cannot be broken—
the produce we purchase
spins our economy, deepens our investment
in ourselves so we can help others
less savvy find that same speed-limited road
to open-market independence.
Each century evaluates, according to history
books, the liberties it thinks
it guaranteed, the evils it upended; today
our code of conduct is a dollar
but there’s more for the money. Take it or leave
evils in their place (take it).
A woman and her daughter sell bitter orange
marmalade at a small table
at the Greenmarket; hand-bottled tastings
of sweet-and-tart pain.
The hoards pay $7.50, 30% more than it costs
at the Garden of Eden two blocks away.
The more we charge, the more we pay
in riches and the unraveling
of them, when the time comes to explain
our appetites and whether the flavors
would have been better blended if we followed
directions or if we had experimented.
Diane Mehta is a poet and critic living in New York. Her most recent poems are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Witness, The Gettysburg Review, and Poetry.
A film about departures, the kind without return.
On August 16, the Hikianalia, a seventy-two-foot dual-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe from Hawaii set out across the Pacific for California, powered by the winds, tides, two solar-charged propellers (for emergencies), and a thirteen-person crew.
Embracing boredom and creative constraints, Katchadourian tells of in-flight artwork and other conceptual projects.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Steven Holl, Stephen Mueller, Janet Cardiff, Laurie Sheck, Cornelius Eady, Victor Pelevin, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bill Frisell.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
