Emptiness as the Original Disturbance

by Isra Hassan

fanjoy labrenz, The Red Slip, Fujichrome slide, 2020. Courtesy of the artists.

---

Emptiness as

the Original Disturbance

ISRA HAssan | Mar 2025 | Issue 43

NOTE: for the best viewing of these poems, read on a desktop or in landscape mode.

Emptiness as the Original Disturbance

Aroused by pity, 
this country’s shame-
lessness is somehow 
still insurmountable. 

Trajectory, burdened by 
delirium, has gone cold.

Indentured Marquees

This country’s 
imagination maintains
ultimatums,
believing
screams are voids
born to perform.

This country believes we like being performances.

---

Isra Hassan is a Somali-American poet from Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and can be found in DMQ Review, Poetry Wales, Poet Lore, Logic(s) Magazine and elsewhere.

---

Sally Fanjoy and James Labrenz, known as fanjoy labrenz, are are artists living and working in Hickory, North Carolina. Together they push the boundaries of the photographic medium as they explore light: reflection, refraction, transmission, continuity, translucence and connectivity, to create conceptual and site-specific work. Most recently their work has been exhibited at the Cain Center for the Arts in Cornelius NC, the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC, the Charlotte ArtPop Class of 2023, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and ArtFields 2024. Their project Light in Space received a grant from the United Arts Council of Catawba County for 2023. An abstract of a 2019 project at the Hickory Museum of Art with Corning Optical Solutions was published in the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies 2021 Augmented Images, Büchner-Verlag.