Force Visibility
by Salma Sharif
Everywhere we went, I went
in pigtails
no one could see—
ribbon curled
by a scissor’s sharp edge,
the bumping our cars
undertook when hitting
those strips
along the interstate
meant to shake us
awake. Everywhere we went
horses bucking
their riders off,
holstered pistols
or two Frenchies
dancing in black and white
in a torn apart
living room
on the big screen
our polite cow faces
lit softly
by New Wave Cinema
I will never
get into. The soft whirr
of CONTINUOUS STRIP IMAGERY.
What is fascism?
A student asked me
and can you believe
I couldn’t remember
the definition?
The sonnet,
I said.
I could’ve said this:
our sanctioned twoness.
MY COVERT pigtails.
Driving to the cinema
you were yelling
This is not
yelling you corrected
in the car, a tiny
amphitheater. I will
resolve this I thought
and through that
RESOLUTION, I will be
a stronger compatriot.
This is fascism.
Dinner party
by dinner party,
waltz by waltz,
weddings ringed
by admirers, by old
couples who will rise
to touch each other
publicly.
In INTERTHREATER TRAFFIC
you were yelling
and beside us, brie y
a sheriff’s retrofitted bus.
Full or empty
was impossible to see.
From Granta Magazine. Reproduced with kind permission from Granta.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem 2016
About Salma Sharif
Solmaz Sharif (b. 1983, Istanbul) studied at the University of California, Berkeley and New York University. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and is a former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Sharif, whose parents were both Iranian, writes that she admires most those poets ‘who refuse to bar the political from their work while refusing to capitulate to it.’ This balancing-act is recognisable in ‘Force Visibility’, her shortlisted poem. As she describes it, the poem ‘deals with the language of state-sponsored violence. Or the violence of state-sponsored language’, noting that ‘the words that appear in small caps are terms taken from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.’ What’s striking about the poem, though, in its almost queasy intrusion of the public and the private worlds into one another, is the disorienting effect of its overlaid perspectives, the impression of several lives being lived at once. Is this, the poem invites us to ask, one effect of living with a multiple heritage in modern America?
