Mandible Wishbone Solvent
At the end of Asiya Wadud’s Mandible Wishbone Solvent, in the prose-poem “Nearly Any Two Things Can Cohere,” the speaker watches a video of a US Border Protection agent emptying out water containers left in the “Sonoran desert, right where the US and Mexico meet,” for people making the journey from Central America. His mechanical movement, says the speaker, is “a simple muscle memory of an act that once contained vitriol, but now the bridge that connects this action to actual people suffering at this crossing no longer exists.”
Wadud is an astute interpreter of the world as a text. She shows us how the physical space rendered (un)available to those fleeing disaster is akin to the conceptual breadth lacking in our minds: “If we cannot imagine a destitute journey, one born in an urgency that forces someone to voyage across borders, then it is in that moment that it is possible to empty water from jugs, again and again.” Wadud asks readers to match her connective brilliance by turning toward the world with a discerning eye, daring us to expand our minds and behold complexity. Her poems refuse to surrender to a reading that is easily impressed with her syntactic mosaic.
In “be a bridge over something,” she writes:
be a bridge over something
be echo or residue or green question
be a loose suture, extension and supplement be a primrose and covenant
be an image pinched and pruned turned oblong
hemmed
and hemmed
and let go
A poet of transits, and liminal gaps, Wadud writes after other conductors of space, like the sculptor Howard Smith (to whom the book is dedicated) and the painter-poet Etel Adnan.
From the poem “a symmetrical open plane, curve,” after Adnan’s “Untitled, 2018”:
a threaded needle disciplined
a threaded needle carves a field
I am laden with early embers
letting them encase me
the arch of a blue chord
skims
changed ember charged
