The Second Person
Poetry by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
“No one other than yourself could have given you a greater taste for life than for death.”
—Suicide by Édouard Levé, translated by Jan Steyn
“You will not know
me,” the piss glimmer the lit stage, the stun parade
of tungsten, negative
a hundred and sixty
sparks a weekend
spent by the man,
two claws for fingers
shining by the fountain the incremental telling
at the mall, what trees
alight as the sun
slips into the window
cleaner’s tendons pull
the tug into a dream
a spool of friends
who move like money,
voyagers and others
in the space of a wheeling of what you suffer;
lady with the son whose
smile catches the origin:
a floating square flitting
sickled in another high,
the filigree root
of lust; the thirst-bliss
pop of Ativan. Slumped purpling body of a tongue
under a payphone,
dealer of the lost
and found, tea sits ready to be
in the trash, creaming
a map of its new face.