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The Same and the Other

in each hand a disparate dream: in all dreams
   another far
      too quiet: delirium
                                 of the mask and God behind it: paradise
had no winter like
                          this: this
      is the one where the infant sleeps in the dirt
the sleep
of a dreamless mind so far from home
   he no longer resembles anyone:
  his mother, thrown
down, hunted, sick
with fear, sleeps next to him among the filth of animals: his father
              watches (the imperative
   that love
—not solace—
                      demands), for there is no room for another
              sleeper: the desert will keep
bringing its mirage,
no doubt:
             the child will walk in his shimmering garden, says

the wilderness, if you just get across:
                                                          motes in the light rise and rest:
             sole face left (remember you are dust)
                                                                       of our first lost image:

Gina Franco is the author of The Accidental, winner of the 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize and forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press, and The Keepsake Storm (University of Arizona Press, 2004).

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About this Poem

“The title of this sonnet is taken from Emmanuel Levinas’ book, Totality and Infinity (Duquesne University Press, 1969). A few pages into the book, Levinas describes selfhood as emerging through the way the self exists in the world: ‘The way of the I against the ‘other’ of the world consists in sojourning, in identifying oneself by existing here at home with oneself. In a world which is from the first other the I is nonetheless autochthonous.’ I was thinking about that word, ‘autochthonous,’ about the dream of belonging, of being ‘at home’ in the refuge of the world, even as ‘I’ move through and against it. I was thinking about how that movement is brutally restricted for those attempting to cross the border—how selfhood for a migrant person is regulated and denied; the cruelty of the border is that it enforces an uncompromising binary between the same and the other.”
—Gina Franco

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More by this poet

The Idol and the Icon

no telling what lies on the other side:
                                                                     the X and its door:
                the wayfarer arrives at the throne
                                                                             at the end of the world
to find that the throne is a cardboard sign
                                                                             scrawled in black marker:
              (I thirst):
                               no one, nowhere: no “look no further”:
 
though the boy

Gina Franco

2019

The Artificial Infinite

like a room with an open window, we
               were haunted:
                                         neither exit nor entrance,
fully: so the ghosts crossed our thresholds:
               they have all gone out, they have all gone in:
the little houses leaning into the field of grass, the water

Gina Franco

2019

Poems

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The Same and the Other

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