Voluptuous Bristle by Ravi Shankar

$14.00

 

Lucia

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in
six different positions, redolent with your scent,
helps me recall that last night was indeed real,
that it’s possible for a bedspread to spawn
a watershed in the membrane that keeps us
shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,
that I didn’t just dream you into being.
You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,
give my hands their one true purpose,
find in my shoulder a groove for your head.
In a clinch, you’re clenched and I’m pinched,
 we’re spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched
in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,
only to be resurrected to stage several revivals
that arise from slightest touch to thwart
deep sleep with necessities I never knew
I knew until meeting you a few days
or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.
Ravi Shankar, “Lucia” from Voluptuous Bristle, published by Finishing Line Press. Copyright © 2007 by Ravi Shankar.  Reprinted by permission of Ravi Shankar.
Source: Voluptuous Bristle (Finishing Line Press, 2007)

 

 

 

 

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Voluptuous Bristle

by Ravi Shankar

$14, paper

RAVI SHANKAR is the founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat [http://www.drunkenboat.com}, one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts. He has published or edited seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including the 2011 National Poetry Review Prize winner, Deepening Groove. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond, called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared as a commentator on the BBC and NPR, received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong and an Associate Professor of English at CCSU.

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