Starboard

Anida Yoeu Ali - Red Chador from a recent exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum

Starboard

I wouldn’t have expected it over pizza
more grease than good but
a woman
a sailor of this century
under game six of the NBA Finals
hair like a landslide
said as if it was nothing 
or a name

we find home
twice a lifetime
once at sea
and once 
again
at sea

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At the exhibit that features the above photo, there is a room playing a film on a loop. Only a museum is able to play a film such that every scene feels like the middle. In the culminating scene of this particular film, Anida Yoeu Ali left the Red Chador (the red gown pictured above) to float disembodied in the ocean—a place without boundaries, an indefinite home. I’ve now seen this short film about four of five times from various visits to the museum which accentuates the the sea-like quality.

The italicized bits above are some confabulation of what I overheard at a bar and lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness which often reckons with the awesome power and omnipresence of the sea for those along the Mediterranean and Black Sea. The prescience of this book has been sitting with me for months.

I love what happens in the gap between hearing, memory and meaning-making. As mentioned above, this poem is really a strange stew of loose memories, but that’s a life.

I also recently saw this graphic of the globe with an emphasis on the ocean - reframing to see the ways that we are merely among water.

With gratitude,