- Evil
flower, reality
Evil
I used to believe there was so much evil in the world,and though I’m the gentlest of all my friends, I never saw a rose in a vasewithout pinching the petals between my thumb and index fingerto make sure it wasn’t plastic.
But lately I’ve begun to doubt the existence of evil altogetheras if all the hurt in the world happenedat the moment we make surethat the creatures we’ve made to bleed are real. [End Page 34]
Iman Mersal is the author of four collections of verse and three works of prose, including How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts (Sternberg, 2019). Her recent poetry has been published in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among others.
Robyn Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale University and is author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton, 2019). He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam (New Directions, 2016) and Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (New Directions, 2013).