Poems March 2023

Chat assis

Pencil thin, pregnant again,
displaying your Dracula teeth,
you watch me from the steps of the great mosque.
Original sin will not be settled today.
If death begins in the eyes,
it is faraway.
But when are your babies due?
Will they be born in the park at night?
Will they be orphans?
You and me, we are strong,
self-sufficient types—herds of one.
Licking your coat,
with high-raised heads and soft tits,
you suffer not, you nomad.

New to The New Criterion?

Subscribe for one year to receive ten print issues, and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.
Subscribe

Henri Cole’s eleventh collection, Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994–2022, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Topics: Poetry

Download

Chat assis by Henri Cole

New to The New Criterion?

Subscribe for one year to receive ten print issues, and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism. Subscribe

More From This Author

View All

To a snail

The horsemen

Chat assis by Henri Cole

Subscribe for one year to receive ten print issues, and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.
Subscribe