Curriculum

View with a cathedral in it,

sooty. Fountain with the face of a merman

about to spit water through

chipped lower lip but

holding it in.

Another postcard rack.

Another stall at the market

displaying African waxprints

on tote bags, dresses, broad skirts

sold by a white man. I copy a list

of French colonies and their dates

into a blank white notebook.

On a bed of ice

haphazard piles of silver-grey fish. “The eye

should be clear,” said my mother.

I don’t want to look

at the eye. What’s visible

from inside a Brutalist building.

Institutional green

linoleum tiles c. 1961, of a sturdy kind

the year my mother emigrates.

What’s visible alongside

a nearly motionless canal.

Alongside a river

brownish-green, predictable,

romantic, like a few-weeks fling

that soon splits in two directions.

Irrepressible bodies of water

surrounded by buildings from centuries prior

whose filigrees gather soot

as excess definition.

Wreathed in trash

something classical

and repulsive endures.

The exterior of the famous museum

once a fortress

is powerwashed

behind large scaffolds fitted with tarps

screenprinted to mimic

the exterior of the famous museum.

One vertical band of newly-washed portion

bare and ridiculous beside the

car-crammed thoroughfare. Piss

against trees and walls and the seams where walls meet

trickles and stinks like a moat.

In a concavity where the likeness

of another wealthy person once stood

pigeons sit.

The oxidized face

of a statue of some goddess

streaked in it.

In the gay club the dancer showers in front of us live

behind glass coyly

not revealing his dick

while screens project him digitized

in slight distortion on either side of him.

He snaps a small white towel

in front of himself and keeps it up

against the glass with his own weight.

Under this dancefloor

across from the bathrooms

a red room cordoned off.

It doesn’t have to be there to be there.

At the market’s end

bruised tomatoes, nectarines

so soft they’re left for free.

“Cirriculum” Copyright © 2019 by Ari Banias. Originally published in Poetry Society of America. Used with the permission of the poet.