-after W. N. P. Barbellion
I close the door to my sky blue room.
To feel you there behind it.
The sky blue room is incomplete and imperfect.
The sky blue room faces a window and faces a door.
The window faces another window.
And this window faces a thick web of leaves.
//
A man, dying, sat facing a window which faced a set of leaves.
I do not know where the door was.
He counted the leaves.
I sit facing the window facing the leaves.
I don’t finish counting.
The task, like my eyes, wiggles and curves and loses its place.
Watching them is preferable.
The leaves wave like eyelids of an audience watching back.
How many of you there sit before me?
I count you to lose you.
That’s finished now.
//
He sat and he counted all the leaves.
He was surprised by the number.
I’ll leave the task
Like the sky blue room with its corner missing
Facing a window with a corner missing, facing a closet with a door missing, facing a door with all of its corners and a small hole through the center.
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is a writer, artist, and editor living in Brooklyn. She teaches in the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute. She has performed, screened, or exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Electronic Literature Organization, Human Resources LA, the Altered Aesthetics Film Festival, the Brussels Independent Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, Jellyfish Review, Passages North, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her debut book Who Loves the Sun was released in 2023 via Meekling Press.
