KHALEED, Jazra
The Light that Burns Us

Midday is hot. It cripples me
It’s been two days since I ate. I’m pregnant with tempest
Children don’t play in my neighborhood
Lovers don jockey caps
They are flat. Like their kisses
They are unwrinkled
They walk along the streets, elbows jutted out
News gets plastered to the walls in my neighborhood
Glee festers like a bullet in a cop’s stomach
I myself sell butcher knives at the abattoir of the everyday
I write a poem every time I go from my home to the metro
I am waiting to be touched

The English-language debut of Jazra Khaleed, one of Greece’s most radical poetic voices—now in an expanded edition—is an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization.

Born in Chechnya in 1979, Jazra Khaleed is an Athens-based poet, translator, and filmmaker whose works focus on issues of working-class experiences and cultures, homeland and origin, immigration and war, and are an indictment of racism, social injustice, and classism in contemporary Greece. Employing elegant rhythms, contemporary street speech, and flashes of Byzantine and New Testament Greek, his poetry reflects a refined erudition and control that Greek readers have trouble equating with a man named Jazra. Khaleed's poems—written at times from a very personal perspective, and at others from that of an objective outsider, but always disruptive, vehement, electrifying—tear the untroubled reader back to a reality that may well be dangerous. [publishers’ note]

Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine, Viktoras Iliopoulos, Sarah Mccann, Jason Rigas, Max Ritvo, Angelos Sakkis, Josephine Simple, Brian Sneeden, and Karen Van Dyck.

Published by World Poetry Books, 2024
Poetry