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The Whirlwind Review Issue 1 Table of Contents More Poetry Previous Siham Karami
The StorytellerLinseed oil-soaked wood and kerosene-fueled, pumped-up firefly-light pulse their pungent fumes and shadowy flares rising to the ceiling, which slowly disappears inside the storyteller’s deftly unrolled voice, his face a beautiful enchanted otherworld, a haunted palace pacing through my heart. I hide my trembling heartbeats, quivering fires that flicker as his words graze the ceiling, leaving little caves with secret passages through the known universe beyond where he becomes the stories, rising, disassembling edges unexplainable, and reassembling them, inviting visitors through the Unseen small openings like eyes in every thought and oceans, each ocean containing billions of conscious minds, swirling galaxies of minds, each aware of its small place and time, watching, forming countless stories, and I know none of them, not a single one. He conjures phrases dancing eloquently between agony and relief a sadness soaring its dark love whose pathos bathes us all to the core with longing, longing to know more, each aching cell arching just to hear his reverent voice enthrall this fluttering soul perched, my wings humming slowly on the cabin wall, my heart’s open door in kerosene-and-linseed air, a breath withheld by reverence, his lamplit countenance buoyant, unaware his words have landed there, awakening a flare of cold silver, a wisp, a wire awaiting small charged particles of pure love, free of fire, just grazing chamber walls like distant thunder; my wings slow their fluttering to keep it there, inside and pure — my eyes touch his a split second, testing to be sure he cannot feel his words have formed a pearl glowing in a shell and I will never tell the storyteller. |
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