FREE UGH (#7)

Bring me one ant even to this helvetical (“she who is only a figure for the richness in the land”) blankness. its sad windows with their frowning arches. Through which a blue hand reaches, blue with blood, and picks up the pen, and writes, as if clumsy, as if trailed by circus ants, in red shoes, the shoes of the motion plagued in blue, of the juggled blood. The knees of the sobbing boy pulled in, in Malta, “as if saying farewell to his knees”! That is Mrs. Ballston’s son, the orphan. A young marble hoarder, with only two or at most three marbles, for his life, already too short, will last forever, and three marbles is already too much for his hoard, like three eyes dividing among themselves one glance.

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Originally published in the Chicago Review

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Farnoosh Fathi is the author of the poetry collections Great Guns (Canarium 2013) and Granny Cloud (NYRB Poets 2024), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets 2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York.