On Thursday, March 6 at 7:30 PM, I will be reading from The Silence Of Men at RiverSpace in Nyack with my friend, Joseph Legaspi, whose new book of poems, Imago, was published this year by CavanKerry Press. Joseph’s poems, which break male silences in ways different from but also similar to my own, explore in truly moving images the world of his childhood in the Philippines, his deep connection to his family, his coming to the United States and more. I will be reading from The Silence Of Men. For more information, click here.
Here is the title poem from Joseph’s book:
Imago
As soon as we became men
my brother and I wore skirts.
We pinched our skirt-front into tents
for our newly circumcised penises, the incisions
prone to sticking painfully to our clothing.
I was partial to my sister’s plaid skirt,
a school uniform she outgrew; my brother favored
one belonging to my grandmother, flowers
showering down his ankles.
By this stage, the skin around the tips
of our penises was swollen the size
of dwarf tomatoes.
As a cure, my mother boiled
young offshoots of guava leaves.
Behind the streamline of hung fabric,
I sat on a stool and spread
before a tin washbasin. My mother bathed
my penis with the warm broth,
the water trickling into the basin like soft rain on our roof.
She cradled my organ, dried it with cotton,
wiping off the scabs melted by the warmth,
and she wrapped it in gauze, a cocoon
around my caterpillar sex.
I then thought of the others at the verge of their manhood:
my brother to replace me on this stool,
a neighborhood of eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old
boys wearing the skirts of their sisters
and grandmothers, touched
by the hands of their mothers,
baptized by green waters,
and how by week’s end
we will shed our billowy skirts,
like monarchs, and enter
the gardens of our lives.
///
And here is the title poem from my book:
The Silence Of Men
A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apartment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writing. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phallus begins to waltz to music
I cannot hear, its scrotum a skirt;
its testicles, legs cut off at the knees.
I want to know why this disfigured
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflating
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of shallow blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.
///
I hope you’ll come hear us read.
On April 16th, Persian Arts Festival welcomes Maryam Habibian, author of the play Forugh’s Reflecting Pool: The Life and Work of Forugh Farrokhzad, and Fawzia Afzal-Khan, editor of Shattering The Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. Dr. Habibian will read a section from her play and offer a dramatic reading of some of Farrokhzad’s poems, in English and Persian. Dr. Afzal-Khan will sing a selection of Farrokhzad’s poems in Persian.
