Featured Poems From Mythic Delirium, Issue 19, Summer/Fall 2008 Song for an Ancient City Amal El-Mohtar This text will be replaced

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Merchant, keep your attar of roses, your ambers, your oud, your myrrh and sandalwood. I need nothing but this dust palmed in my hand’s cup like a coin, like a mustard seed, like a rusted key. I need no more than this, this earth that isn’t earth, but breath, the exhalation of a living city, the song of a flute-boned woman, air and marrow on her lips. This dust, shaken from a drum, a door opening, a girl’s heel on stone steps, this dust like powdered cinnamon, I would wear as other girls wear jasmine and lilies, that a child with seafoam eyes and dusky skin might cry, there goes a girl with seven thousand years at the hollow of her throat, there goes a girl who opens her mouth to pour caravans, mamelukes, a mongolian horde from lips that know less of roses than of temples in the rising sun! Damascus, Dimashq is a song I sing to myself. I would find where she keeps her mouth, meet it with mine, press my hand against her palm and see if our fingers match. She is the sound, the feel of coins shaken in a cup, of dice, the alabaster clap of knight claiming rook, of kings castling — she is the clamour of tambourines and dirbakki, nays sighing, qanouns musing, the complaint of you merchants with spice-lined hands, and there is dust in her laughter. I would drink it, dry my tongue with this noise, these narrow streets, until she is a parched pain in my throat, a thorned rose growing outwards from my belly’s pit, aching fragrance into my lungs. I need no other. I would spill attar from my eyes, mix her dust with my salt, steep my fingers in her stone and raise them to my lips.

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From Mythic Delirium, Issue 19, Summer/Fall 2008 To the River Jessica Paige Wick This text will be replaced

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for CSE Cooney He said come to the river, the wet, wild water that is black as a mirror with nothing to show. He said come to the river, the dirt-dank river, by the dew-spangled banks of the murmur and flow. He said come to the river. And I came to the river. I came to the river, with a ribbon in my hair, with a tune on my tongue, with a name that he gave, with my red shoes tied, with my milk and my bread, with a stone in my pocket, with my heart, not my head, with my knee-socks high, and my bed unmade. He said take your red shoes off, leave your buttons undone. And he kissed me by the river until there was blood. And the river took my ribbon, which fled the current like a snake. And the river took my tongue, and the river took my name. He took from me the tune I knew; And the river made my bed. He said come to the river, the wet, wild water that is cold as a hand with no blood to warm. So I came to the river, and I stay by the river, by the silt-silked shore, by the stone that I slipped on, by the fern-beds so dark, by the buried red shoe, by the salt stain I made, near the road that I left that leads to my bed. And I know I am dead but I still cannot rest. And I'm hideous and hair-thatched because I must be trash for him to throw me to the river like a used cigarette. Fish have skimmed flesh from my jaw; they've nibbled with sharp teeth. My finger-bones lie tangled, far away from here, my ankle bones are further still, my smashed hips are the dirt . . . He said come to the river so I stay by the river, by the sopping wet earth, yes, come to the river, boys, with no ferns in your hair, come to the river, please, and warm my bed.

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“Song for an Ancient City” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 19, Summer/Fall 2008. “Song for an Ancient City” copyright © 2008 by Amal El-Mohtar. Photographs by Amal El-Mohtar, copyright © 2008. Voice recording by Amal El-Mohtar, © 2009; all rights reserved. “To the River” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 19, Summer/Fall 2008. “To the River” copyright © 2008 by Jessica Paige Wick. Illustration, detail from 'Ophelia' by John Everett Millais, c. 1851-2. Voice recording by Jessica Paige Wick; 2008; all rights reserved. These poems and photographs may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ express written permission. Previous classic and featured poems by: David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Gene van Troyer Jeannine Hall Gailey and Charlee Jacob Theodora Goss and Sonya Taaffe Samantha Henderson and Ann K. Schwader Catherynne M. Valente and Anna Tambour Back to newest featured poems.