(Ethos

BY Eileen Tabios

missing the tip
of her nose

slanted cheekbones behind fur

she stiffens my spine into leaving the bed we’ve never shared

photograph of Athena, 400 B.C.

ancient marble reaches across centuries to contradict our people:
“the Ideal cannot be manifested”

Honor the lucidity of certain objects: feather, diamond rose
and others now fallen through the sieve my memory has fought
against becoming

Once, you hovered —
you desired this knowledge:
How long can idealism be maintained?

 

Biography

EILEEN R. TABIOS has released nineteen print, four electronic and one CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, two books of fiction, and a poetry essay/interview collection. Recent releases include the relational elations of Orphaned Algebra with j/j hastain (Marsh Hawk Press, 2012), Silk Egg: Collected Novels (Shearsman Books, 2011) and The Thorn Rosary: Selected Prose Poems 1998-2010 (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011). Recent anthology publications include poems in La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente (The Alteration of Silence: Recent North American Poetry) co-edited by William Allegrezza and Galo Ghigliotto (Editorial Cuneta, Chile, 2011) as well as critical prose in the forthcoming Reading the Difficulties, an anthology on reading innovative contemporary American poetry co-edited by Thomas Fink and Judy Halden-Sullivan.

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