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Articles by Ari Banias
Task
There’s a poem I tried to write about bathing you the last day you were alive. On one of our drives home: I want to die without shame. You didn’t elaborate. I described standing across from a stranger paid to do this work, her presence anchoring me in the task with you between us. From this distance I can use the word task. Your pain the astrologer said A gift for others A mixing bowl filled with warm water we dipped washcloths into before wringing them out rested between your legs.
Dream Nest by Dana Levin - Poems
Aerie, a two-ton nest. Adolescent pines snapped to kindle the crotch of a greater tree's looming a fledgling iced and powdered shore. Destination is warren and hunt—the quivering kit, the river's silver quickening; destiny the ginned field unfurling bolt run to stop. The shadow descending. Rising to that forked holding: three gray hooks, all fuzz and wide eyes and eager bobbing necks craned toward a sky steeling to Mother above them: that great beak, all it brings down.
Onta
No ceremony for the initiation into facts— Only patience that is not time. The fist Of the mind grows roots and greens into a fern. The fern of the mind suffers a solar age And becomes what it suffers—the sun is not A star, but a flower. A voice in the eternal Honey says, What is needed is to think with the flower Of the mind. Suffer is a word meaning many words— Endure, experience. The flower endures the sun By eating it. I only say I when no other word Will do.
Triple Canopy – When You Look at a Fence by Ari Banias
When You Look at a Fence Ari Banias “When You Look at a Fence” was published as part of Triple Canopy’s Immaterial Literature project area, which receives support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Museum Piece
This poem appears in our Fall 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Freud—who wasn’t wrong about everything—distinguished between two responses to loss: mourning and melancholia. Where the former describes a process in which the self relinquishes its attachment to a lost object so it can move on, the latter marks a response in which the subject, unable to release the lost object, instead incorporates it—and is therefore thrown into a state of ongoing unease.
Museum Piece
This poem appears in our Fall 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Freud—who wasn’t wrong about everything—distinguished between two responses to loss: mourning and melancholia. Where the former describes a process in which the self relinquishes its attachment to a lost object so it can move on, the latter marks a response in which the subject, unable to release the lost object, instead incorporates it—and is therefore thrown into a state of ongoing unease.
The Happy by Ari Banias
In a room more chicken coop than room, I rent a fan that feels on my face like sound. Low traffic from San Fernando, named for a king who became a city, a valley, a saint. We are meant to repeat his name. Instead I say prickly pear, a cactus which spreads its many-paddled hands into the space around itself. No pears. I call Mom to ask what the latest austerity measures mean. Some ants on the wall make their way from one unseeable point to another; the banks have closed.
National Poetry Month Day 5: Ari Banias
National Poetry Month Day 5: Ari Banias BLUE Here the trees appear pasted up against the side of it in front of hills. Partly this has to do with light partly with position. Wanting a perceptual shift, stare up. Against the side of what has no sides here in front of some hills with no front. * What it feels to be; what you are told. The stubborn programming. * The single palm on the horizon a shaggy lap dog.
How Many Lives Have We Lived in Paris? by Cyrus Cassells - Poems | Academy of American Poets
You recount the history of the French garden. From above, I see tight rows of trees beside threadbare grass. When the language teacher talks about le capitalisme: the gesture of three fingers rubbing imaginary fabric. I’m a tourist, vulnerable and stupid, my legs showing, shoes practical, face red. Together, we try to reconstruct an anecdote whose contents have scattered. A motorcycle passes, a French police siren you say sounds innocuous then we both laugh sourly.
Pronoun Study
They paid them to cut their olive trees down. You paid them to cut their olive trees down. We paid them to cut their olive trees down. They paid you to cut your olive trees down. We paid you to cut our olive trees down. They paid you to cut their olive trees down. We paid them to cut our olive trees down. They paid us to cut their olive trees down. They paid us to cut your olive trees down. We paid you to cut their olive trees down. We paid them to cut your olive trees down.
Lie by Janet McAdams - Poems | Academy of American Poets
for Marilyn Monroe I buried Mama in her wedding dress and put gloves on her hands, but I couldn't do much about her face, blue-black and swollen, so I covered it with a silk scarf. I hike my dress up to my thighs and rub them, watching you tip the mortuary fan back and forth. Hey. Come on over. Cover me all up like I was never here. Just never. Come on. I don't know why I talk like that. It was a real nice funeral. Mama's. I touch the rhinestone heart pinned to my blouse. Honey, let's look at it again. See.
Meander/ΜΑΙΑΝΔΡΟΣ
decorative hellenic borders on paper coffee cups on a silver ring I used to wear it feels nationalist now /it was always nationalist actually I would say dawn is fruity not milky, not gold what to do with the lie of ethnicity at dinner T says ‘Greece’ is an invention of the nineteenth century was this green once? unknown the cicadas go on a law against refugees passed by the children of refugees
459: The Feeling
The Feeling by Ari Banias Each spring, a cloud travels up from the south to an island in the Aegean. The red cloud is coming, the townspeople say. Or, the red cloud has been here. What cloud? my mother asks. Since when? The red cloud covers the buildings, the cars, in a fine red film of dust from elsewhere. That we imagine we cannot feel the wars is an American feeling. That we cannot see them, that we say they are somewhere else. But someone pays the police. We do.
Human Time
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Fountain by Ari Banias
You recount the history of the French garden. From above, I see tight rows of trees beside threadbare grass. When the language teacher talks about le capitalisme: the gesture of three fingers rubbing imaginary fabric. Together, we try to reconstruct an anecdote you say sounds innocuous then we both laugh sourly. I hadn’t seen a woman slap a child in some time. A truck reversing, and the alarm that continues for hours one morning.
A Symmetry by Ari Banias
The magnolia before it blooms stands
bare as a statue from antiquity or
a shaved puss, it flowers first
then greens. A pissed off dyke
climbs into the branches
to be held by an ancient
indifference and both
were me. Yet it’s possible I am
a short bald man. That I am neither
a big-bosomed wide-hipped pretty
nor a short bald man. An antelope, an elk, a deer
on this rug, a twiggy tree. The genderless squat figure,
solo, blurry, hands on hips, that repeats.
LGBTQ Poetry
“Dear J.” by Kazim Ali It should be a letter … “Honestly,” by John Ashbery we could send you out there … “Lullaby” by W. H.
Trans Issue
An Introduction to The Offing's Trans Issue 2015
Wildfire Moon (Summer, L.A. 2016) by Carol Muske-Dukes - Poems | Academy of American Poets
... reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience. --T. S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said" 1 She began as we huddled, six of us, in the cellar, raising her voice above those towering syllables... Never mind she cried when storm candles flickered, glass shattered upstairs.
New Poems from Ari Banias: “An Arrow” and “Bouquet”
Too often I’d like some direction but am ashamed of this fact, still I ask for it, men are supposed be bad at admitting to fulfill this is lost on me. Who cares what men are. Can’t we scrap this whole enterprise, seriously I fill in over and over, like feeding pennies into a slot it leads somewhere I think I’m saving them. For when? The pulldown menus reach longer and longer, so to scroll becomes the new version of a sweeping gesture, more ways to be erased.
Three Poems - The Feminist Wire
By Ari Banias Some Kind of We These churchbells bong out one to another in easy conversation a pattern, a deep ringing that wants to say things are okay, things are okay – but things are the compromised gesture, the mind divorcing from the eye as it sees, and I can’t trust a churchbell, though I would like to the way I can trust that in this country, in houses, apartments, there somewhere is a cabinet or drawer where it’s stashed, the large plastic bag with slightly smaller mashed together...
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