Iman Mersal

Trans. by Robyn Creswell

REspect for Marx

In front of brightly-lit windows
overflowing with lingerie
I can’t stop myself 
from thinking about Karl Marx.

A respect for Marx
is the only thing my lovers had in common, 
and I allowed all of them, though to differing extents,
to paw at the cotton dolls
hidden in my body.

Marx

Marx

I’ll never forgive him.

Robyn Creswell is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). A former poetry editor of The Paris Review, he currently is an editor-at-large for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux book publishers.

Iman Mersal is among the most celebrated contemporary poets in the Arab world. She is the author of four collections of verse and three works of prose, including How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts, a hybrid of cultural criticism and personal memoir.