Introducing Our First June Featured Artist – Siham Karami!

Siham Karami’s first poetry collection, To Love the River, celebrates life with all its agony and transcendence as a kind of spiritual pursuit. She lives with her large family, too many cats, and a a whirlwind rescue dog. Her chapbook manuscript Whore of Blue was a finalist in the QuillsEdge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has been widely published in such places as Able Muse, The Comstock Review, Off the Coast, Third Wednesday, South Florida Poetry Journal, Literary Mama, and Anti-Heroin Chic; reviews in The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Glass Poetry, and thethepoetry. Photography is her latest obsession, with work forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Fourth and Sycamore, and Peacock Journal. Nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter @sihamkarami





Today we’re introducing Siham with a stunning unpublished poem.

between the agonies, in the intake 

where the breath resides

for just one moment, 

where the open petals fleetingly

in their apex pink, astonish

the rods and cones’

understated noticing,

and in the alveoli before exhale,

magenta surges through my arteries,

a word from you I dare not possess

while holding it alight, so that on exhale

the flower within it

will not wilt nor my heart alter

its expectant rise,

its pulse a shivaree of pur-purples, goldleaf-greens,

and la-la-lavenders —

a smoky receptivity rubs its lamp

releasing genies from inside

an enchanted crucible