Instead of Most Wanted
by the FBI, each week
they profile the life
of a dissident, a former
inmate of Bariscov prison.
He came home every evening
to his flat after a day of cranking
the presses for the Communist daily
and he uncovered his ancient Corona,
and inserted seven layers of onionskin
and seven layers of carbon
because that’s how many sheets
the keys could imprint
and he typed each letter
of a banned novel
keeping the margins thin
to get the most words in
except he left the white space
around Ginsberg and
Ferlinghetti.
Added: Wednesday, July 16, 2014 / Ghebremichael's poem took First Place in the Split This Rock 2010 Poetry Contest. We are grateful to Chris Abani, judge for the 2010 contest.
Simki Ghebremichael helped found National Poetry Week in 1986 in San Francisco—the genesis of April’s National Poetry Month begun by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. A featured reader at DC-area poetry venues, Simki’s poems are in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Innisfree online. Her journal excerpt on the start of the Iraq War appears in Keeping Time, an anthology of journal writing from Passager Books in Baltimore (2009). She has recent poems in Concise Delight and So To Speak, George Mason University’s feminist literary journal. Her poetry chapbooks are 23, Getting the News From Poems, and Africa/Vietnam. Always inspired by multicultural meetings, she is most proud of her bilingual three-year-old grandson who is fluent in English and Czech.
