Mess Hall — Blackbird Archive

← v16n2, Fall 2017

Your knives tip down

in the dish rack

of the replica plantation home,

you wash hands

with soaps pressed into seahorses

and scallop shells white

to match your guest towels,

and, like an escargot fork, America,

you have found the dimensions

small enough to break

a man—

a wet rag,

a bullet, a bullet

like a bishop

or an armless knight

of the Ku Klux Klan,

the silhouette

through your nighttime window,

a quartet

plays a song you admire,

outside a ring of concertina wire

circles around a small collapse.

America, ignore the window and look at your lap:

even your dinner napkins are on FIRE.

politics violence race history

Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz Sharif is the author of the poetry collection Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, received the 2017 PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry, and received the 2018 Levis Prize. She holds degrees from New York University and University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery” Poetry Prize from the Boston Review, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, the 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is a lecturer at Stanford University.