Ali Znaidi and The Blues of Anti-Destruction

The Creative Anarchy of X

Mallets awaken the xylophone.
Between the wooden bars the X sinks.
Only chaotic polyphonies are heard
through the horizontal crackle of the slats.
& the shepherd is only interested in x-raying
that recently dead scabietic goat.
& his fingers have just awakened the xylophones
(incorporated in her rib cage) before the worms do so
because he wants to listen to the melodies of the sinking X.
—Blueprints for a structural chaos of his blues.


Reverberating Nostalgia

Nostalgia reverberates back & forth
like the ebb & tide [input/output].

Aided by the might of a stylus [a palimpsest]
the tidal flow configures & reconfigures
that avalanche of coastal rocks, building
its integrity as the foe of destruction.




Ali Znaidi (b.1977) lives in Redeyef, Tunisia, where he teaches English. His work has appeared in various magazines and journals worldwide. He authored four poetry chapbooks including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014). He also authored a fiction book titled Green Cemetery (Moment Publications, 2014) which is in fact the first Tunisian flash fiction collection originally written & published in the English language. Some of his poems have been translated into German, Greek, Turkish and Italian. You can see more of his work on his blog at aliznaidi.blogspot.com.