Siham Karami

Siham Karami’s
poetry collection To Love the River (Kelsay Books, 2018) has been described as “always polished, never tamed.” She’s had work published in The Orison Anthology, The Comstock Review, Able Muse, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poetry International, Tiferet Journal, and many others. Nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.com. 

 

Venus Presides

over the evening parking lot bathed in mercury glare
and the traffic stream bleeding white corpuscles,
each nucleus a blip of consciousness
tethered to the street or screen, oblivious,

as overhead, the ancient deity
of love and war, ascendant and conjunct
with Jupiter, creates a sign
whose magnitude outshines the halogen

in which our shadows flare across the lot
under gods unmasked as circling globes
like ours on which we pave and bury worlds—
the woodlands martyred for a subdivision;

a Bruno’s felled by the recession,
replaced by Walmart, the ice cream
parlor bulldozed where a radio once blared
“What Girls Want” and we were going

to the beach, not this dragging shopping.
Let’s get inside the store—we have no time!
A sky I never noticed meets my gaze,
transmuting every thought

into a thought of Venus,
god of now, of being on the ground,
of moments which feel so unchangeable
at the moment when they change.