Robert Okaji: Four Poems
The nine lesions
in my brain have not yet diminished language
receptors. Nor my imagination. But
how will I know when it happens?
Robert Okaji: Knowing What I Now Know
I would love more.
I would love better.
I would love.
Robert Okaji: The Continuing
The body attacks itself, realizes the futility
in compensation, as the spirit expands
over the horizon. I am old, and yet…
Pinecones linger. The neighbor’s dog
pees on our shared fence.
Robert Okaji: Nothing of Heaven
How must we interpret
such change, feelings sorted and filed
into separate chambers, like people
herded into showers, like bullets
in the air seeking flesh.
Robert Okaji: Dream Score
I empty my mother’s ashtray of its treasures—
various picks, the broken watch, a mandolin bridge,
that lock of my wife’s hair—then peer through the amber
glass at a distorted day. What looks back at me?
Robert Okaji: Something Felt
The way a wren’s cry at dawn
creases the air, then folds it
into a poem of comfort
Robert Okaji: Postcard from Pandemic
They stack their cart with essentials:
frozen garlic, six packages of grilled
mushrooms, fifteen cans of garbanzo
beans, three bottles of truffle oil
Robert Okaji: Five poems
What’s wrong, you ask.
I’ve breathed your dream too
long, I say. Now I must wake.
Robert Okaji: Scarecrow Sees
Da Vinci maintained that sight relies on the eye’s central line, yet the threads holding my ocular buttons in place weave through four holes and terminate in a knot. My … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Scarecrow Believes
What is a ghost if not misplaced energy, an apprehension or the sum of invisible integers and the properties they possess? I preside over this sea of maize, tracking clouds, … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: The Theory and Practice of Rebellion
Such small lives we’ve led, diffident, quiet, until provoked. Remove our words, we become steel and sharp stone, fletched softwood splitting the air, string reverberating, singing resist, resist. … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Aleppo
A father sings to his son, dead two days, and the platitudes persist. Widow of night. Lantern’s trick. What trace, you wonder, exists of humanity in these etched walls? Light … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Letter to Marshall from the Scarecrow’s Pocket
Dear Daniel: How fortunate we are to tap into this medium of ether and zeros and ones and all the combinations employed in our paperless context. I am drawn to … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Scarecrow Votes
I am no citizen, but here I reside in the fields among my dark friends. We’ve laughed together, but they will not miss me. One day I’ll vanish without ceremony, … Continue reading
