Allegory of Higher Education
By James Reidel
There is a row of cigar boxes filled with tissue in my revery, no shortage of beds in the canary ward. There is that abandon to pour out the Lincoln logs from their drum, so as to build the operating theater for every idea and those thin, green planks, like that first wooden ruler, repurposed for dollhouse benches rising into a gallery. The ether is pretend, just plain Pine-Sol. We only need patients, the will to snatch them from cages, to suffer the nips and pecks, the tiny yellow beaks razor sharp from carving cuttlebone masks into white cicatrices. A basement will do as the infirmary — one whose mother works — until the halt are well enough to shed their bandages, to throw off their popsicle sticks splints and let them fall like crutches that you only saw as a trampled fence.
Shirin Khalatbari, The Tower – Piece #3 of Babel Trilogy, 2019, Silver Gelatin Print, shot in 2015 in Ur, Iraq, 9" x 11".
James Reidel is a poet who works in many genres, including biography, fiction, and non-fiction. His most recent work includes a short story in The Vanity Papers (i.e., Oxford Review), poems in Café Review and Westchester Review, and translations of Franz Werfel’s poetry from the German in Mudlark. His latest book-length narrative is a revisionary history of the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle trials of 1921 and ’22, based on rediscovered court reporter transcripts over 100 years old (see peoplevsarbuckle.com).
Shirin Khalatbari is an artist, archaeologist, activist, and educator born in 1987 amidst the Iran-Iraq war and airstrikes, and raised in Tehran, Iran. In 2009, they relocated to Italy, where they earned both their bachelor's and master's degrees in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from La Sapienza in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Upon immigrating to the Bay Area in 2016, Shirin pursued their MFA at San Francisco State University, graduating in 2019 with the Graduate Award for Distinguished Achievement. In 2018, Shirin was honored with the Murphy Award, a recognition that bolsters the progressive visual arts movement unique to the Bay Area. They have exhibited internationally in California, Italy, and Iran. In their artistic practice, Shirin delves into the repercussions of colonialism in West Asia. In 2019, Shirin co-founded MUZ Collective with two other artists, Natasha Loewy and Beril Or. MUZ is dedicated to uplifting our community and creating opportunities for emerging artists through curating exhibitions where they can be exhibited along with established artists.