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While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me by Charif Shanahan

By T.

1 February 2026

562

While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me
Charif Shanahan

Specks of toothpaste fleck the mirror.

A fan spins dust in the hall.

I find “this is it” too vulgar to accept

So I wait for a new starting point

As though life will begin there and then.

Do you know what I mean?

Not what I’m saying, what I mean.

Is it possible my function is to hold

All the intricate, interstitial pain

And articulate clarity?

Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.

Give me a pair of shoes, I grow fins.

Twice an hour I trick myself into focus:

I look into the glass as I look through it.

When the new beginning comes, what then?

Does life suddenly reset like an Atari?

Does meaning emerge

Assertively and without invitation?

The task is to live well enough with you.

But how? How do you know what you want

If you don’t tell you? If you don’t hear you?

KEEP READING

SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan, published by Tin House, 2023. (Available direct from Tin House • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)

DESCRIPTION

“Lambda Literary Award – Winner, 2024
The Publishing Triangle Award – Winner, 2024

Winner of the Whiting Award
Winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry

“A truly magical achievement.” ―Ocean Vuong

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate.

With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.” (Source)

ABOUT CHARIF SHANAHAN

Charif Shanahan is the author of two poetry collections, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry… (more)