Kathy Engel

Kathy Engel is a poet who has worked for forty years at the nexus between social justice movements and art/imagination. Her books include Ruth’s Skirts, poems and prose (IKON, 2007), We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, co-edited with Kamal Boullata (Interlink Books, 2007), The Kitchen with art by German Perez (Yaboa Press, 2002), and  the chapbook, Banish The Tentative (1989). She works as Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.   Her new book, The Lost Brother Alphabet, was just released by Get Fresh Books (2020).

From Now On

you will never forget the miles across the sea from, say, Delhi 

to New York, are nothing really  you want to learn 

the language of a four- legged  winged   finned   birch

and sunset maple    you’ll watch piping plovers still 

gather and lift in unison as if they are the ghosts                          

                                                      growing 

you will bow down to nurses and truck drivers   farmers

and single mothers teaching their children while working

in one room homes and those without one room   bow to 

the clearing sea    the chance of day    gift of lung    you 

will know contamination is only the cells within you    

                                                   ticking   

you will dare to speak    dare not to speak   walk 

to nowhere and somewhere  rest when you should 

be working   you should not be working   there will 

be no you   only the I who has become a we       

flesh made of earth   skin of sky     pleading breath

                                                water  

Haiku Without Writing the Word [Pandemic] 

the short night becomes 

long, moon holds strong, stars tease my

sky, this body shakes

          after Basho’s “the short night“

June Letter to BFF  

because June introduced us

because it was the 12th day of June

thirty-seven years ago you poeted 

soapbox on a street corner 

at the center of the universe

a million humans snake

dancing the streets, drums, puppets,

shadows cloaking monks 

from Nagasaki

we remembered a future laced 

with poems    torched night   lit day  

the heat of our daring, the tearing

of separation, a map we were

blasting open and sewing   but the people 

of peace wouldn’t say    Palestine    

remember that?

I’m grasping for meaning

and last week also in June

your goddaughter read your An Enchanted

Hair Tale for a hungry congregation—

the spirited boy, his festival of dreadlocks.

Where is he now, with what mouth

can we hold his name today

black as love 

Sudan   Sudan

where have you gone, are you a man

walked out of the story, escaped 

the sentence of night, namesake, 

what light can humans make 

of our redundant bodies, 

what interruption

who can we keep alive  

          for Alexis De Veaux

          note: Sudan is the name of the child in the story

Message to Self on 63rd Birthday  

Tell your hurried breath you’ll give up the race to be admired.

Let the dazzling bones of those you’ve lost light the way.

Listen to their haunting rasp and rhyme. Soon enough 

you’ll be dust too, joining a wild out-of-tune chorus. Now 

it’s time to open the body’s space like a sail. Remember 

the language you yearn to become. Be dangerously loyal to that call. 

You might lose your job when you wear those riotous syllables 

like a naked sonnet slicing the night or a flag stitched from 

the slogan rich t-shirts you flaunt. You might fail those you love. 

Again. So easily you don’t notice as it happens. You might 

fail your own desire to be brave. So what. Luscious salt waves 

keep taking you back. Now, tell your beloveds, all those animal lives:

what whets your appetite for dawn’s curved entrance is everyday

thorn, a field of questions, the radiant halt and start of nearness.