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
Robert Okaji: The Question is Never
Who will lock the door or leap in front of the jacketed bullet. Nor is it four words born in lust and camouflaged with piety. No one cares … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Sometimes Love is a Dry Gutter
Or a restless leaf, a footprint. Is fault on a blameless day, scrawled on a washed-out sky. My friend’s music orbits his home, worms through the cracks in … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Letter to Gierke from the Future’s Past
Dear Ken: I’m fixated on open faucets and drained tanks, on cracked PVC and browned grass, denial and what’s to come, thinking of old dogs and accusations and how the … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Snails
How convenient to carry a home on one’s back, I think, disregarding heft and plumbing and the shape of rooms too hollow to feel. Yesterday a box of African chapbooks … Continue reading
Robert Okaji: Scarecrow Calls Out the Man
These things I cannot name: that finger of night between fear and peace, in which darkness both cloaks and hugs the wide-eyed. A snake, in the open. And that space … Continue reading
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