POEM OF THE MONTH
Monostich
Untitled (Paris, rue des Grands-Augustins) by Bram van Velde (1961)
funhouse
father as a funhouse mirror: somewhere in that mess is my reflection.
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Farah Shah is a recent University of Central Florida graduate, spending time between degrees learning to bake sourdough, overworking her airfryer, and penning sappy poetry while she waits for her dough to proof. She spent her formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, and thinks the best parts of herself come from that time.
Poems have always felt like little nooks of the brain to me. I keep knicknacks, memories, mirrors, and other tidbits in my poems I can't always keep in the mainframe of my memory. The challenge of encapsulating a moment in a monostitch felt a bit daunting at first, but I found the less you're able to write, the more you're able to say.
My father, like most, is a combination of mess and magic. Everytime I look sideways at a mirror, I see him, waving back. The older I get, the more it feels like a blessing. Anyways, I hope this poem reminds someone to call up their dad. Writing it reminded me to call mine.
We received almost 800 submissions for this month’s form, Monostich (one-line poems), and Farah Shah’s “funhouse” stood out for its punch and the balance of universality & specificity. The form demands compression without loss, and some clarity without simplification, and I guess also some mystery. Farah Shah delivers all of that.
The poem tilts as you read it over and over. It’s tender, playful, funny, sad, devastating. I love that the father isn’t idealized, nor rejected. He’s distortion and inheritance. We see in this line years of love and centuries of inheritance with all its messy complexities.
The cliche of “less is more” is rendered true in poetry over and over, especially here.
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