About six months ago, I picked up a volume of contemporary poetry in my favourite book store in Berlin, Marga Schoeller Buecherstube in Charlottenburg. The volume of poetry was The Last Visit by Chad Abushanab, and I‘ve been reading it on and off since then. Every time I open a page randomly, I‘m stunned at how potently these poems speak on the subjects of family and violence, and particularly of the poet‘s relationship with his alcoholic and abusive father.
Many of Chad Abushanab’s poems feature breathing, breathing as a measure of who someone is at any one moment, in relation to another: the father‘s smell of whisky from his mouth, the sound of him sleeping.
And although Chad Abushanab uses more or less the same word, „breath“, „breathing“, he taps into a fundamentally different – I don‘t know how else to describe it – soul moment. Breathing as a way of recognition, of knowing, of connection, not something to be taken lightly and definitely not to be taken for granted. He does so, I imagine, from an experience of living on the edge, of having come close to a question of life and death. And from this, his gift of poetry to the world springs.
I’d like to share one of the poems from The Last Visit:
Negatives under Microscope
I‘m focused on the space inside your eyes—
first pupil, then iris, now cellular disruption—
in search of some clear catalyst, some reason
for these scars, for this crooked helix on my chest.
I want the DNA for empty bottles.
I need to know what made your cruelties grow
unwieldly, like cancers let loose upon a body.
I‘ve scoured the entire frame, pushed past
the edge of every family negative
believing the secret‘s hidden, like a code
between the plastic and the acetate.
I stare for hours at a single portrait,
deducing from a smile the hell behind your face.
At times I think I smell the whisky sweet
perfume of you, as though each image captured
something of how you lived, how you breathed.
But then each clue turns out a part of me:
a hair, a thumbprint left while leafing through
the pile of specimens, a flake of skin,
a barely visible scratch I made in haste—
more me than you, more you than science,
naked and pinned down beneath the lens,
as though our cause is finally in the frame,
begging for exposure, for light.
Source: Chad Abushanab, The Last Visit, Autumn House Press, 2019