John C. Mannone
The following poem was first published in The Aleph Review, Vol. 7 (2023). However, the epigraph of the poem was mistakenly omitted. The complete poem is being published on our website by way of a corrigendum. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. Artwork by Zara Asgher, sourced via Kaleido Kontemporary.
—A Found poem after Buckminster Fuller quotations
Ninety-nine percent of who you are
is invisible and untouchable. Search
others for their virtue, and yourself
for your vices. Everyone is born
a genius, but the process of living
de-geniuses them. When I am
working on a problem, I never think
about beauty, but when I have finished,
if the solution is not beautiful, I know
it is wrong. Nature is trying very hard
to make us succeed, but nature does not
depend on us. We are not the only
experiment. The minute you begin
to do what you really want to do
it’s really a different kind of life.
John C. Mannone (Knoxville, Tennessee), author of four collections, has recent work in Transformative Power of Art Journal, Wood Cat Review, and The Windward Review. He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He can be reached at: http://jcmannone.wordpress.com/
Zara Asgher is a visual artist and educator from Lahore, Pakistan, currently living and practicing in Finland. She graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2011 and was awarded the prize for the 10 Best Works of the Young Artists Exhibition, Day After Tomorrow in 2012, by the Punjab Arts Council, Pakistan. Asgher has participated in group shows nationally and internationally. She was awarded a full scholarship to pursue an M.A. in Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education at Aalto University, Finland. She has worked on art educational programmes with the Espoo Museum of Modern Art and the Finnish Museum of Photography. The featured artwork is from a duo show in our lives we can notice a breath, then breathing (Kaleido Kontemporary, Lahore), where she exhibited work alongside artist Nisha Hasan.