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    Over the Anvil We Stretch
    Over the Anvil We Stretch
    Over the Anvil We Stretch
    Ebook99 pages50 minutes

    Over the Anvil We Stretch

    By Anis Mojgani

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    About this ebook

    Over The Anvil We Stretch contains swampy, powerful poems that are as exciting as the pocket knife you got for your birthday, the three legged frog on the lawn and the jar of marbles your mother kept in the kitchen. Mojgani's poems are the sound of the river and the stars burning above. He manages to capture the axe in the stump with blood still on the handle. Anis Mojgani has drawn a map of the country in the shape of his wild surreal poems. These are memories of a life, captured through the blue green filter of the bayou. Mojgani's latest poems are tinged with the sound of crickets spying on us in the darkness. They move forward honestly, brutally and sweetly. The reader will be led into briar patches as well as the moonlight just on the other side.

    Anvil is a book of poetic truth, packed with humor and insight. It is a juggling act of the epic and the intimate. I read it and it echoes. Shut up so I can hear more. -David Gordon Green, filmmaker, All the Real Girls and The Pineapple Express

    Anis Mojgani, Andrea Gibson, and other young poets of their talent are the future of American poetry and frankly, that fills me with joy! --Thomas Lux, Guggenheim Fellow & recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book Split Horizons

    He’s probably the best poetry slammer alive. The intellect, optimism and humility with which he speaks feel like proof of the relevance of “spoken word†as a genre. He processes the world in slices of beauty, frustration and sympathy... -Willamette Week Newspaper
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9781935904885
    Over the Anvil We Stretch

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      Book preview

      Over the Anvil We Stretch - Anis Mojgani

      Title Page

      Over the Anvil We Stretch

      a collection of poetry

      †

      by Anis Mojgani

      Write Bloody Publishing

      America’s Independent Press

      Long Beach, CA

      writebloody.com

      Copyright Information

      Copyright © Anis Mojgani 2010

      No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.

      Mojgani, Anis.

      1st digital edition.

      ISBN: 978-1-935904-88-5

      Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes

      Cover Designed by Cole Nuckols

      Illustrations by Anis Mojgani

      Proofread by Jennifer Roach

      Edited by Saadia Byram, Derrick Brown and Michael Edward Sarnowski

      Special thanks to Lightning Bolt Donor, Weston Renoud

      Printed in Tennessee, USA

      Write Bloody Publishing

      Long Beach, CA

      Support Independent Presses

      writebloody.com

      To contact the author, send an email to writebloody@gmail.com

      Dedication

      Dedication

      for the magnolias of new orleans,

      the honeysuckle on my grandparents’ walls,

      and for sarah who helped find me

      on days when I wanted to stay lost

      Epigraph

      When the rain hits the snake in the head,

      he closes his eyes and wishes he were

      asleep in a tire on the side of the road,

      so young boys could roll him over, forever.

      — Frank Stanford

      Intro to Part One

      A pitchfork fell from the sky. It fell like a struck crow. It hit the earth and broke into large dust. A small boy took the broken pieces, their atoms murmuring, and in the dark swallowed them. The slivers dropped like lightning into his gut, scratching his throat on the way down. The boy sat on his knees before he went to bed. Trying to sleep, he tossed like a thundercloud. His organs grinding the piecemeal pitchfork into the pieces of himself, the bits of it moving through him, eeking out the sound of metal across bone and skin. The sky came in closer to listen to the song his body was making. He curled like an armadillo, arms wrapped around himself tight as a tomb, trying to both claw the song out of his belly and to protect it. Across the sky’s shoulders he scraped his palms until he was too tired to bleed from them, his body so soft that everything hurt. On the other side of his life, the river moved like a dark instrument. A long cello wailing softly and longly, waiting for him to move his fingers through it.

      One

      We were horses

      The black clouds and the stars

      that danced between them, were a carnival.

      And we were the kids born of it.

      when I was sick

      I bit down. Broke the thermometer in my mouth.

      The mercury coated my stomach in silver. I swallowed a bird.

      He pecked his songs across the metal of my silver belly.

      The notes echoed through my throat and outside. He made

      the beautiful things that flew out from me. But the melodies

      twisted too much. They kept me up at night. So I climbed outside

      and sat in a field. I watched the spiders, fat on rain water, crawl

      over the wet grass, and filled a jar

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