Parwana (excerpt)

Mina Zohal

The image dispenses us, and we become the parenthesis between two bodies, two continents. I feel like tarred twine, poor quality twine dangerous with no breaking strain. I want to tell someone about the scandal of it all as I stir in my shadow and consider the feebleness of my outward mobility. I want to memorialize the dance, but I don’t want to use brute force to demonstrate the tumbling chaos of everyday politics. I want a different kind of defeat, I want a different kind of now. Life is a kind of sudden thing, a monstrosity that has me like brown leaves soaked in a ditch.

What happens when sound closes in? And in all that bright thawing, you know you should hurry up, but you keep picking grains of sand from between your toes thinking about “Postscript on Societies of Control.” You know you should move. You should make a move. You should watch the birds for any migratory change. You don’t want to be a loser. You don’t want to have a Neo-Noir world view. You take turns holding obscure gods, holding your notebook, your lover, your own diseased hand. Sounds are closing in, coming to trick your unconscious into being afraid of what might happen. But you want to break it down. You want to bleed the blood of an immigrant bird. Your migration is occurring. It’s always occurring.

Mina Zohal holds a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University and an MFA in Poetry from Bard College. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston Award and the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. Her chapbooks include Narenj ha from Belladonna Press and Stalker from Three Weeks Press. She is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo from Coffee House Press and co-editor of The Selected Translations of Anselm Hollo (forthcoming 2025) also from CHP. Her work can be found in Brooklyn Rail, Apogee, and others. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as BAX (Best American Experimental Poetry) and Emergenc(Y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War edited by Sahar Muradi and Seelai Karzai.  She is currently working on a manuscript titled Parwana.