ShE

Aug 15th, 2006 | By iantar | Category: Student 2006

By I. M. Antar

She has her bones drawn on her skin
with hand grenades and baby powder

She has a cattle prod spine

She is carrying a tin can of screws

a 6 pack of black bic

constellations

and in my back pocket is a little red book on Zen

She sang a song of people she once knew:

calling them saw dust

pushed by a leaf blower

She lifted me with her wind

to the height of intuition ; the bottom of a wishing well

I have a brass bell ringing
singing songs to the water
the moon licks its surface
hydrogen and oxygen crystallized
fragments green Buddha porcelain
resting on a stain-less steel sink

I diced an onion with pink lung capillaries

distorted fabric stained red on white

rose-colored eyes

white crickets chirp to fruit flies
we listen beneath the undergrowth of pumpkin patches

I smell hair burning

red and green jelly beans

a pile of dry leaves

She lights a red candle

twists streams of wax between her fingers

that dry molded to her hand

we drive to Santa Fe mountain tops
I snort cool whip

Ishmael M. Antar is a performance poet, who recently received his Associate of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. He chose to stay there to pursue his Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in poetry and performance. Antar has spent 4 years performing as a stage actor with the IAIA Cool Side of Hell theater troupe, which placed first in the 2005 AIHEC Theatre Competition. He was born in Albuquerque, NM, and was raised all over the continental U.S. His mother is from the White Clay People of Fort Belknap, MT. His father was born on the Island of Trinidad. He says, “My writing and acting go hand in hand. My poetry is written for the page and the stage.”