The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: VOLO by Nathalie Handal

This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from VOLO by Nathalie Handal (Diode Editions 2021).

Téssera

I
The Walls Have Not Fallen

for Bethlehem 1948
from New York via London 2020

[ 4 ]
Pompeii taught us nothing
but told us everything:

That all can erupt
and kill us

but we will
survive

in the city’s
houses, paintings, objects.

But what did the women say
of the hundred hours of harm?

What did the ancient Roman port
near my beloved Naples say

about the city’s faint music
that couldn’t be interrupted?

Should we ask a Pharaoh,
secret keeper or dreamer?

Who dies?
Who gets to survive?

When lips are drying
will the rain keep her exhalations,

like a necklace of water
around the sun?

Will we all fall silent
suddenly,

and wonder:
Had we heard the sounds

of the seagull?
When we walked away

did the sun’s rays on the bench
bend the beauty of the world?

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in the United States, United Kingdom and Asia. Her recent poetry books include Life in A Country Album, the flash collection The Republics, the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, and Love and Strange Horses. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her flash essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, among others. She is Associate Professor of Practice in Literature & Creative Writing at New York University–AD, and writes the literary travel column ‘The City and the Writer’ for Words without Borders magazine.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.