A
fish
meets
another fish
and
lays eggs.
As
its fins signal to the seaweed
its
colors come out
one
after the other.
Its
bubbles are words
meant
for no one.
The
world rises and falls
each
day
through
the eyes of a fish.
From The Iraqi Nights (2014), tr. Kareem
James Abu-Zeid. Mikhail grew up in Baghdad and emigrated to the US in the
mid-1990s; she continues to write in her first language. For all that there are a multitude of Americas, her place there must be an exceptionally strange one. This poem looks at least in part like a comment on her own situation, but there must be other impulses behind it.
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