Orison
- Orison
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Horizon: a tinged yolk in measureless dark, the city lifting with prayer. At the seam,
the black earth sharpens its edges. Voices move
bodies up and down, salah of slow marionettes, and lips pry open the bright
teeth, the undulant throat. These are not words
of asking, like bring her back, or Lord, let fallwater—rather, a divining
of intersections: palm to knee, forehead
to soil, man and God, Allah-hu— roof tile to light. The stomach gurgles, signaling
hunger. Limbs shrink under white cotton. Day breaks
on a carpet of crowns, the napes below them glistening. Later, a man clips an iris,
readying for death. A woman loses herself
in her daughter’s face. The sun hardens, starching the sky with her white collar, and the tongue
retreats, having forgotten its vibrant state. [End Page 146]
Sasha Pimentel, born in Manila and raised in the US and Saudi Arabia, is a Filipina poet and author of Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 American Book Award. She was selected by Philip Levine, Mark Strand, and Charles Wright as a finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature and was a Philip Levine fellow at CSU-Fresno. Her work has been published in such journals as American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, and Callaloo. She is an assistant professor in a bilingual MFA program in Creative Writing on the border of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
