Persistence of Vision: Televised Confession by Solmaz Sharif

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 25, 2016   Persistence of Vision: Televised Confession   Solmaz Sharif

You are like a daughter to me—the prisoner’s mother tells me. Meal by meal she sets then clears. She   rinses some tablewear the prisoner never held, then a glass she did, then recalls her daughter’s   mouth opening softly to drink water on state- run TV, then water over everything. The   glass appears in hundreds of frames before reaching the prisoner’s lips. In between each frame, the grief   our eyes jump to create movement: dark strips to keep sharp the glass lip, water skin trembling, hand that   trembles it. These mothers move as flipbooks, tiny, stuttering pasts, sobbing at the sink. It is death   that sharpens our sight each sixteenth second, slender, blocking enough light so that the prisoner’s face   is again and again alive each light-punctured frame, her mouth: in hundreds of stills is still opening   softly to drink.            Copyright © 2016 Solmaz Sharif. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “The last time you see your loved one is on TV, giving a forced confession, broken, but you look, maybe, for the loved one you could recognize, who is not broken and reading the state-sponsored script—drinking a glass of water, perhaps. You want to slow this down and replay it. You see if grief itself had a cadence, it would be harshly syllabic—broken, sobbing—a flip book, a slowed down film reel of still frames.” —Solmaz Sharif   Solmaz Sharif is the author of LOOK (Graywolf Press, 2016). She teaches at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.   Photo credit: Arash Saedinia   Poetry by Sharif   LOOK (Graywolf Press, 2016)    "Choke" by Eileen Myles "Survivor" by Vijay Seshadri "Tell Me Something Good" by Ocean Vuong Poems on the Air   Every weekday at 6 p.m. (EST) during National Poetry Month, New York’s classical music station WQXR 105.9 FM will feature a special reading of a poem from the Poem-a-Day series. Tune in or visit wqxr.org. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038