Ghazals have always struck me as a literary picnic—a checkerboard blanket brimming with many different dishes composed of unique couplets. This modified, collaborative ghazal, with its ‘No-Thing-ness’ whimsicality served up alongside more serious stanzas, unpacks a memorable conversation for us all under the summer afternoon sun.
If a slot machine is a one-armed bandit,
what does that make you? A cyclopean
troll? I don’t think it will catch on.
You shuffle through your waking house as though
the miracle of dawn does not deserve
acknowledgement, as though the way you go
downstairs, through doorways in the dark, and swerve
We stand on the sidelines watching our children play.
We cheer for our kids and against the others, though
we could try cheering for the other kids
and against our own,
or, we might join with the opposing parents
It’s in the story of an inmate whose dog
shows up at the prison and lies at the double
line of fences.
Image: “Night Train” by Gerrie Paino. “Of California, the Wild” was written by Breonne Stiglitz for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.