While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me

Charif Shanahan

Specks of toothpaste fleck the mirror.

A fan spins dust in the hall.

I find this is it impossible to accept

So I wait for a new starting point

As though life will begin there and then.

Do you know what I mean?

Not what I’m saying, what I mean.

Is it possible my function is to hold

All the intricate, interstitial pain

And articulate clarity?

Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.

Give me a pair of shoes, I grow fins.

Once an hour I trick myself into focus:

I look into the glass as I look through it.

When the new beginning comes, what then?

Does life suddenly reset like an Atari?

Does meaning emerge

Assertively and without invitation?

The task is to live well enough with you.

But how? How do you know what you want

If you don’t tell you? If you don’t hear you?

Thirty-Seventh Year

At the start of this narrative, I will pretend
Not to be alive, not to be

Speaking to you from the living earth.
To help you. I will pretend

The circumstances of our being
Here, together, are casual—

And not incidental
Of this awkward dilemma: How to co-exist

When you would like me dead.
For simplicity. For lack of threat.

In this narrative I will look
At you from a distance, as into the future,

No more real than I am,
Sitting here in my off-white body which I can feel

Charif Shanahan

2023

Trace Evidence

When I say But mother, Black or not Black,
Of course we are polyethnic, your look does not change
Though it does harden, a drying clay bust
Abandoned or deliberately incomplete,
All the features carved in
Except the eyes. What I’m trying –
I mean – You are an Arab, yes,
By culture, by language, and in part by blood; by blood
You are also Black African – and when, then, I say
And probably a fair amount of European, too – the lights,
Though we’re standing at the corner of 195th and Jerome,

Charif Shanahan

2023

Indeterminacy

The cog in the eye turns
Until there is nothing left
To discern. I sip tea

Steeped in a kind of lust—

If I say I am, you are, he/she/it is . . .
We don’t have to agree
But it requires, to mean,

A common rubric.

Charif Shanahan

2023

Poems

While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me

More by this poet

Thirty-Seventh Year

Trace Evidence

Indeterminacy

Poems

Page submenu block

While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me

More by this poet

Thirty-Seventh Year

Trace Evidence

Indeterminacy

Newsletter Sign Up