Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

DANIEL TOBIN
At the Egyptian Exhibit
Thou shalt have power over water, breathe air,
be surfeited with the desires of the heart....
-from an Egyptian sarcophagus
How, you said, you used to sleep—the way
the mummy's hand flared awkwardly, twisted
just so, transposings of the quick and dead
made tractable behind glass. In his day:
tombs stocked full as bombshelters, the soul
beaked and twittering over the body's haunts,
or casting off from rushes in the sun's boat,
^hat scares is how I see you, not cured, gaunt
.. as this shell, but a child curled in your bed,
your small hand in the shape of something gone
but for its remnant. As if someone wedded
these worlds as unalike as skin and stone.
Or as though the wind had stopped to trace
its image in the sphinx's disappearing face.
NIN ANDREWS
How You Lost Your Red Hat
One night my love says to me, Honey, I'm sorry.
You can't love the same woman twice. I should never
have come back. I need to put on my hat and vanish
like an absent mind. He had a red hat
he never wore until that night, though he often said
to me, the soul is nothing but a hat balanced loosely
on your blonde hair. Take it off if you want.
Times like this, his body is all I want. How
easily a love can levitate into the city sky.
And my soul with it, a bowler hat spinning
slowly down until I am caught beneath it
on top of another man's bald head.