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Poetry Tuesday
Activities for Kids

Say something ordinary. Repeat it until it no longer sounds ordinary.

By Shabnam Piryaei
Devyn Mañibo
Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, poetry
November 14, 2023
Sit between a panther and a condor in the dark. Carry a cockroach out of a toilet like an old man wearing thick glasses. Stare at the body until it sputters to life. Do this every day. Take off your shoes, dance backward out of a room, draw hydras hatching from toilets, toss an electric carnation onto a duvet. Repeat this forever, slower each time. Be a hand carving bruises out from apples. Eat the wounded bits. Regard their sweetness. Write a list of those who love you most. Who craft a nectar- swooned world despite the angular logic of daily despair. Write them each a letter using squid ink on the leaf of a ficus lyrata. Fake laugh until you real laugh. You may do this alone. While eating a mandarin imagine a man fallen asleep waiting for his husband. Imagine tiny white flowers flying in through a broken window. Now draw what you see. Walk to the middle of a rickety bridge over feral water. Imagine an opal canyon where a single cactus opens a yellow eye. Let out a yolky exclamation until you run out of breath or until you die. Without moving your body, travel to space. Not the kind with stars, but between two pillars. Wait for a flood. If you survive, share your last dried apricot with the other survivors. Build a suit of memory. This can be an enormous forgiveness. Or water with you in it. Put on your new suit and invite your friends to a costume party at your house. Look at yourself in the mirror. Soft, soft as a room full of kindergartners saying: I missed you.
Access your whole self without the spur of terror. Move abruptly to another country forever. Try not to forget your language. Do not separate the leaves from the root. Stare into an empty notebook until stillness unbraids the hour or until the room is so dark you no longer see the notebook. Repeat a giddy syntax to stun you aflame. Once I ate cilantro. It tasted like nature. Once I ate cilantro. It tasted like nature. Once I ate cilantro. It tasted like nature. Once I ate Once I ate Once Compose a song about how the moon feels absorbing prayers. Call it everything but violence. Play it near a pond coated with pink camellias. Walk into the frigid sea. Do not retreat when a family of seals draws near. Say something ordinary. Repeat it until it no longer sounds ordinary. Go to a party. When someone asks you a question, do a tumbleweed dance. This may include absence, the interminable hour, the breakdown of systems that facilitate haste, etc. Using a pen you find on the ground, draw a picture of yourself 40 years from now. Wait 40 years. Draw another picture, this time looking in a mirror. Who could I have saved but didn’t? Pack a camera. Go door to door and ask your neighbors to say the question aloud. Take a photo of them just after they finish. Persuade time to untie its dummy limbs and leak out all its water. Stand waist deep in liquid trying not to touch your face. Handle a dead animal tenderly with bare hands. Do this until you hear it whisper. Every day write three handwritten notes that read, You are someone important. Fold the notes and leave them in unremarkable places across the city. Meditate to the sound of someone pushing one rock slowly over a field of rocks. Write EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE over and over in a lined notebook until there is no more space. Create more space.

Shabnam Piryaei  is an award-winning poet, playwright, media artist, and filmmaker. In addition to authoring the books Nothing is Wasted (The Operating System, 2017), Forward (Museum Books, 2014) and Ode to Fragile (Plain View Press, 2010), she’s made films that have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and public installations around the world. She’s been awarded the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Award, Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Transport of the Aim Poetry Prize, the Brain Mill Press Editors’ Choice, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her play “A Time to Speak” was staged at the MAD Theatre Festival in the United Kingdom. She is currently directing a documentary film entitled No Separate Survival about asylum seekers across the U.S.-Mexico border.  She is the founder and curator of the online art and interview journal MUSEUM. Her art has been exhibited at the Unlike Art Gallery, Elysium Art Gallery, New Gallery London, Youyou Gallery, Jotta, Kala Art Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Galleria Perelà. You can read more about her work here.

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When the Chant Comes: Two Poems by Kay Ulanday Barrett
'After midnight you assemble your limbs back to / their rightful place as you rid the pressure formed / by all day heat and no privacy.'
Minoru
The stallion: one win short / of the triple crown. My intonation: / one stress too many for an apology— / all the times I got it wrong. Minoru, / Minoru—both are gone.
Minted
Treasure, treasury, / treachery.