Discipline: Literature – poetry

Farnoosh Fathi

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2009

Great Guns

Who goes, asked the pore, there on one hand so beautiful? The
modern
nets and fishes out contumely; there is palsy in the grass high on
noon's shoulders.
The great guns of a lover--
his sweat broke into ants that led the other way.
One must lie down. Grand debt of the observer!
This unremarkable suffering and these annotations on the lily.
Even the water here grows, spoken of, so highly, so likely.

It comes rolling on an eye
to a foothill and it stops; its drops stretch taut-- like
the guts of heavens devising
to suck the ivy of visitors from even the safest face, behind which
a lover peels and peels; as certain and as full as all beauty, its obese
gold navels
and indelible shoes without escape.

Great Guns

Sympathy

Whose table is that, left on three legs?
If there’s been a mistake, it may be
in assuming less vulnerability
as one fills the vase—

whose buoyant comfort exaggerates
at the sight of his own proffered,
sympathetic hand, striking him so clean
in comparison

gloved white, magician—for a sec
he even sees the calla lily’s furl
in the gesture of voilà!

Sympathy

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium Books, 2013). She was born in 1981 in Lafayette, Louisiana to Iranian parents, and raised and educated in California, Texas, and New York.

She's the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Fulbright Program, and her poems, translations, and prose can be read in Boston Review, Everyday Genius, Poetry and Jacket2.

Studios

Phi Beta

Farnoosh Fathi worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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