Hello Friends,
There is a special little group of poems that are about a slip between words, misreading or miswriting, and today's poem-a-day by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello belongs to that group. See also Natasha Trethewey's "Letter" or Sherman Alexie's "Psalm Like It Hot."
Enjoy.
Ellen
I fell in love with a North Korean
by falling asleep on his shoulder
in a South Korean subway.
Later, perhaps because of that,
I misread the Arabic word gurfa,
not as the amount of water
that can be held in one hand,
but the amount of wonder.
As if one's entire history could be
measured one handful at a time.
As if we knew another way.
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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello's "Above the Thin Shell of the World" can be found in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, maintained by the DC-based poetry organization Split This Rock.