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  • Balconies, and: How the hands
  • Fahrad Showghi (bio)
    Translated by Harry Roddy (bio)

Balconies, that seek intimacy in the over-another. Something that has already been the case, a knowing right up to being tread upon. That also goes for laundry that’s askew and the line of roofs set running on the horizon. We say: Always the same mistakes. How they set things right and beyond that create the clouds. In different altitudes away above our heads. [End Page 488]

How the hands

How the hands move, have things brought. Into experience and back again. I determine that the silence here is looking for something. Also the connection to reality that five fingers can grasp. Finally they stroked the child’s head. Whether I now turn mine can’t be said. How I suddenly live here while the pillow cases keep their usual distance. From the window’s double pane, from the screen door. This doesn’t have to get any more laborious, even if the hands have something else occur to them. Indeed, I am completely eye, sitting here in pants and shirt. I still possibly have such a face. It dances before me with room to play. With that, one can get up, feel light on the cheekbone, the progress of the contours up to a feeling for form. And afterward no about-face, always more alike and further out, driving through Mahmoudabad and on to Meybod. [End Page 489]

Fahrad Showghi

fahrad showghi is a psychiatrist, poet, and translator who resides in Hamburg, Germany. His End of the City Map (Ende des Stadtplans (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) was published by Burning Deck Press.

Harry Roddy

harry roddy is an associate professor of German at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. This is his first publication of poetry translations.

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