For your enjoyment: “Let it Come Down” by Ian Harris
This was published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Black Warrior Review. Very nice.
Let it Come Down
Ian Harris
Despite being afraid of catching cholera
from standing water,
I am playing with ships in the bath.
This is maybe 1983.
After my bath I will look at a National Geographic.
The stereo is playing a Shankar record
and my mother is reading the tarot.
I am too young to know it yet but
I will hold a state record in the 200-meter butterfly
and fall in love with a girl from the coast of Oregon.
Other things are less clear. Colors of cars rode in?
Names of girls fucked at swim meets?
I once thought I remembered looking onto a Persian city
spread in the night like a phosphorescent octopus,
but it turns out it was a scene I’d read from a Paul Bowles novel
in which a man whose pockets are filled with good ganja
finds himself about to enter a city he’s never been in.
It wasn’t in the cards for him, so you know. It ends badly.