13 Jul Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Posted at 11:11h
in Poetry
POEM BEGINNING WITH FALSEHOOD
I imagine you jerking off to parts
from Society of the Spectacle
your face lethargic like after
smoking a bowl on a Wednesday
in my bed in red sheets stained
with somebody else’s cum
I feel good, I feel fantastic
lying in bed with someone else
lying in bed and lying to myself
an auto-tuned track that does not end
even when you cry and watch me
make the mistake of thinking
I can out-think everything. Now I want to say
I’ve got Marcuse! I’ve got Deleuze!
Now I want to say I feel like
Michael Fassbender’s character
at the end of Shame when he looks
at the person on the train and looks away.
Even then I imagine touching myself
while you’re in my bed and your eyes are closed
and wet.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the recipient of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was a finalist for the 2016 National Magazine Awards. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Puritan, Canadian Literature, and filling Station, and her first chapbook is Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017). She lives on unceded Coast Salish land where she works as the poetry editor for Prism international magazine and where she guides the Ennet House Reading Group devoted to reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace over the summer of 2017.
