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Shorn, treaded red

Asiya Wadud

^{after “Satellites 27” by Etel Adnan}

ochre starts
commence catalyst and evensong enters

a flame lit arched and yearn
gleam, twofold

weary but not from this life
in time flame begets pools of
shorn Decembers
limber months evade us
the flood
begets
burnished

catalyst and a hem
treaded red, quaked

slide gleam and slide trifold
mirroring the fresh lake whirring
mirroring the whirring shorn wave

11 nocturnes
you fibonacci
you catacomb

Asiya Wadud is the author of choral, or (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025) and Mandible Wishbone Solvent (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Themes

Form

About this Poem

“In a Fibonacci sequence, each sum builds upon the previous equation. Etel Adnan’s work reminds me of a Fibonacci in this particular way. I am drawn to the ways in which her poems, paintings, tapestries, and leporellos make evident a lineage, thread, and lifelong excavation of what mattered most to Adnan. I wrote ‘Shorn, treaded, red’ after visiting some of Adnan’s paintings last winter. This poem is meant to speak to the luster and circular logic I saw in Adnan’s ‘Satellites 27’ but also, given the moment in which it was written, it is an opening to something more elegiac.”
—Asiya Wadud

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number four

            everything we have made
            halved in its own colloquial
                                    guardianship
            the drained lake
            the felled castle
            the timbre of a lone voice
            not ever disturbed
            the fist of new snow on its

Asiya Wadud

2024

attention as a form of ethics [excerpt]

^{We are mired in matter until we are not
— Ralph Lemon}

I thought we were an archipelago
each felt under our own finessed and gilded wing
let’s make an assumption
let’s make an assumption that the lake has a bottom
let’s make an assumption that everyone will mourn
let’s sack a hundred greenbacks

Asiya Wadud

2020

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Shorn, treaded red

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