FALL/WINTER 2026
Teaching Nezami II and Other Poems
Eugene Ostashevsky
Teaching Nezami II
Love is ambivalence, Majnun. You love and you hate. Somebody said that before.
For two and one are different numbers. Two is an apartment without entryways between bedrooms.
It says exit everywhere and you read exit but there’s no exiting, there’s only the reading about exit. You can imagine.
Mirrors hang everywhere in place of windows. They reflect. What do they reflect on? You can imagine. Such is the meaning of the number two.
Whereas somebody who is truly one has no body. As they cannot speak, they must make do with signs, which are naturally ambivalent, because they are not what they say.
We, who are surrounded by signs, experience the scarcity of sure and certain knowledge.
For example, we don’t know where childhood goes to, but it must go somewhere, otherwise it wouldn’t go anywhere.
It’s as if somebody took off with the take out and all we got was these fortune cookies. Our lives are spent reading the fortune cookies but we don’t speak the language and we are really very hungry.
Majnun, you are looking into a mirror. You look like the Venus with the Arresting Butt by Velázquez. Men everywhere rush to save you from the five gashes of an envious suffragette.
Somebody takes mercy on you and scatters millions of scarlet roses while singing, which is the same as signing. Who can it possibly be? You want to be one with them.
The problem is that two and one make three. I literally don’t think you can be one with anyone.
I can show you the difficulties of succession in a handful of words. “We desire increase”—which is the verb and which is the object?
“You are a puppet of my mother’s,” says my daughter when I refuse to buy her yet something else. It takes such inner resources to refuse and I almost always fail.
Because I wanted her to speak English like a native—but of what island?—I attached my credit card to her Kindle. Consequently, her study of the twenty-four volumes of Phoebe and the Unicorn hath been at my charge.
The Living and the Dead
The dead are exploited as much as the living but in another manner.
To exploit comes from the same word as to explicate but not from the same word as to explain.
To explicate means to smooth out the folds produced by crumpling so that the fabric lies straight. A fold is an irregularity of surface geometry.
To explain means to even out, as with a plane. A plane is a tool for shaping wood using muscle power to force the cutting iron over the wood surface.
By cutting with the grain, a plane levels knots, where later the trunk sprouted branches.
The branches in spring sprouted foliage, the object of a word which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- meaning “to thrive, bloom,” but now all that’s left is a knot.
As the knot is a fold of the grain, it is cut at once with the grain and against it. Thereby the knot offers resistance.
In a situation of offered resistance, a plane can produce an unattractive finish, called tear-out.
The dead who survive their death are dressed in dresses, suited in suits, shrouded in shrouds and/or confined in coffins.
Then a narrative is fashioned about their exploits. Is it a suitable narrative.
The main exploit in the narrative is often the last, whereby the dead are raised to their final and resting position, that of the dead. It is a position over the heads of the living.
So the exploits of the dead are suited to the exigencies of the living, and the mouths of the dead are stopped by the kisses of the living.
For the living need meaning, they drink it and they drink it, and only then can they make assertions in response to questions or even unasked.
After drinking, the living like to self-identify as the loving.
Borrowed Tethers
They crow. They crow louder. They crow crowder. Who they. The crows. A crowd of crows.
The they. In hate, and in haste and hate. Cross and crass crows are. Crass, crass, crass, cry they. What they. Let us lower the crow bar.
But we procrastinate. What we. Tomorrow. Today it is not par for the course. Coarse, crass. A crow is a spare head.
Hang the head on a spar. Let us do it for Spartacus. Tomorrow. Crown a crow. Escrow. Put its feathers in.
Crown a crowd. Put the crowd in a row. Is it a row or a row. It is a row of crows. Do crows crow in it. Or do they craw.
Caw. Caw. They coopt. They coopt appropriately and cooperatively. They coopt appropriately and cooperatively in a corn field. They coopt corn rows.