Afshan Shafi
This month our archives will feature poetry from some of our editors. The first selection is by our Poetry Editor, Afshan Shafi; this poem was published in The Aleph Review, Vol. 4 (2020). This poem is inspired by Stan Lee's original comic.
“That’s my secret, Captain, I’m always angry.”
The Incredible Hulk
Between himself and himself
There was a child borne to the middle air
Dulcet, incisioned
It held no memory of its glass-womb,
Freshly borne,
Its hand was
The size of a pentagram,
Cut
On the crag of a saucer
‘The strangest man alive’
Was all throat
(the tensile scruff of his neck in bloom;
Jade sepals, shedding their
Pleated bounds)
His meditations were
A long kneeling,
Gulls, pneumatic, swung beneath his arms
The drawn smoke of his breath
bore
Irises, paper lotuses, a spine dripping honey
Peeling a gull off his shoulders
He was often
Filled with a lubricous kind of kindling
Hulk was playful even in the guise of a brute,
Brimming over the pink fog of
Slaughterhouses
He left a candy heart behind
For each victim
Each heart’s weak red patina,
Described the rutilance of
A strawberry,
Not the full gash of itself,
But keening, metered.
Red, not green, was the Hulk’s opiate
If he could,
He would frill his eyes with autumn trees
And tack each bright root
With the damp skin of
A common felon,
With a history of
Getting beat.
What gave Hulk his Jesuit ardour,
Though
Wasn’t found in lab-ish sanitoriums
But in orchards, where his skin, apple green,
As sharp as peach,
Was first devised
Hulk’s metier, then, was
not anger
but compassion
Not ‘Hulk’ , affectatious, puerile,
But a boy closet-reared,
Hair torn at its tulip root
A blue-rich photograph of
Granny in his pocket
Hulk, not the incredible foe
Of plain-sailing automobiles
Or skyscraper flesh and clavicle
But a trundler attuned
To shingle crusts
A gad-about the
Whiskied pavement
Not ‘Hulk’, but the
Songless romantic
Of the family,
His one pitchy smile;
‘je t’aime’ pissed on the sand
Shah Numair Ahmed Abbasi’s practice draws on popular culture, anecdotes and colloquialisms to stage personal and social narratives in attempts to challenge the politics behind how gender is constructed and performed socially. The figure of the male nude is a recurring theme, often presented in ways that undermine or question idealised masculine virtues. Recent turns in his practice observe how queer men navigate issues related to their identity during interactions within and beyond the community, and across domestic, public, and virtual environments. He repurposes dating apps to investigate the dynamics of fragile spaces where interactions are dislocated, ephemeral, and motive-driven. Abbasi lives and works in Karachi.
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