first is voice/its raspy-edged buzz/ rough
enough to catch in a throat or scratch out
a pause/a glottal intake as if words would
be taste/ licked like a spoon/ drips tapping
like a faucet left slightly open in another
room / like a wind-up watch turning
minutes inside and out
or wait now/ if that’s first/ then next is
thought rising/ heady as cut lawns or
fresh asphalt cooling or a hot wave
beckoning from an open grate /edgeless
as water that comes and goes and returns
weed-strewn and filled with gifts of tiny
shells and pebbles rubbed smoother than
a sound
Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. She was awarded two artist residencies in poetry to the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart prizes and two poems appear in anthologies on the subject of migration. Her journal publications include B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, The Pinch Journal and Prelude.
panoply, a literary zine 