As the barber snipped and combed, lathered and groomed, I lapsed into a kind of understanding with the universe. There in his chrome-and-leather swivel chair as his small talk raged in my ears I counted each hair as it fell, a hirsute mail on my chest. The mirrors, berserk with light, redoubled the room. A twitch in time, you might say. Epiphany. I’ve heard it can happen that way.
Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of two collections, Still Life with City (2022) and Unburial (2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, Pidgeonholes, Palette and many other journals. Day Lasts Forever, his translation of Mario dell’Arco’s selected poems, will be released by World Poetry Books in 2024. He lives in Italy.
Featured Artwork:
Ya-omri
Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is studying Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her works have appeared in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, Native Skin, Lucent Dreaming, Agbowó, Omenana Magazine, MaskLit, Anomaly, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a BoTN nominee and recently joined Visual Verse as an intern assistant editor. She tweets @ZainabBobi.