Living
—
Tracy Fuad
At that time I was still convinced that everything had to be tight.
I brushed a toothbrush on my tooth until my tooth began to gleam.
I see the blue button underneath my hands but I have removed my thumb.
My precious hair was tied to the market until it was too late.
My grandfather was once declared dead.
In that manuscript, he only thought of staying on paper.
I thought it could be a regular ruse.
If I had a living, I would eat it.
I collected evidence to verify my presence.
I intended to reduce it.
Pack it in a separate bag.
Time was not over.
It passed.
The product number was found.
A green horse was added to the cortex.
Masturbation was broken down for thought.
The arrows clapped her hair, her lips cried.
I sent this official concept to my database.
I mean I posted on my vlog.
Then new forest areas opened and finally my comrades were saved.
I'd worn a carving to the party, but no one had noticed.
There were, in every room, some instruments that made no sound.
Everything, made out of matter.
I was at all times a modern object.
A river slitting the city;
an insurgency of the kitchen table;
an arrangement in the name of derangement;
the identified drone of a drone.
The object was zippered, red and gothic; a cement mixer made out of teeth.
An army of carvers had come to take back what art had been extracted from them.
None of them named, the artisans claimed that the artwork was theirs.
Where was the spring of the origin’s source?
The stripped native forest;
The felling of the buttressed trunks;
The razing and the artist;
A palm plantation that spelled SOS in the eye of the drone.
The tree proffered the blueprint for non-toxic varnish.
A plan for the music, an image made after my body.
Well, the instrument’s eye was looking at I while I cried.
And it was all bathed in a note.
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Tracy Fuad is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize and was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a-Day and have been translated into Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel.
Website | Instagram
I brushed a toothbrush on my tooth until my tooth began to gleam.
I see the blue button underneath my hands but I have removed my thumb.
My precious hair was tied to the market until it was too late.
My grandfather was once declared dead.
In that manuscript, he only thought of staying on paper.
I thought it could be a regular ruse.
If I had a living, I would eat it.
I collected evidence to verify my presence.
I intended to reduce it.
Pack it in a separate bag.
Time was not over.
It passed.
The product number was found.
A green horse was added to the cortex.
Masturbation was broken down for thought.
The arrows clapped her hair, her lips cried.
I sent this official concept to my database.
I mean I posted on my vlog.
Then new forest areas opened and finally my comrades were saved.
I'd worn a carving to the party, but no one had noticed.
There were, in every room, some instruments that made no sound.
Everything, made out of matter.
I was at all times a modern object.
A river slitting the city;
an insurgency of the kitchen table;
an arrangement in the name of derangement;
the identified drone of a drone.
The object was zippered, red and gothic; a cement mixer made out of teeth.
An army of carvers had come to take back what art had been extracted from them.
None of them named, the artisans claimed that the artwork was theirs.
Where was the spring of the origin’s source?
The stripped native forest;
The felling of the buttressed trunks;
The razing and the artist;
A palm plantation that spelled SOS in the eye of the drone.
The tree proffered the blueprint for non-toxic varnish.
A plan for the music, an image made after my body.
Well, the instrument’s eye was looking at I while I cried.
And it was all bathed in a note.
Tracy Fuad is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize and was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a-Day and have been translated into Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel.
Website | Instagram