Oh, This Could Be the Last Time So Here, by Peter Twal

Peter Twal’s poems have appeared (or will soon) in Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter Online, Public Pool, Quarterly West, cream city review, The Journal, Devil’s Lake, RHINO, Booth, Yemassee, DIAGRAM, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Peter earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Read more at Petertwal.com.


First inspired by the LCD Soundsystem song “All My Friends” and later the poetry of Habib Al-Zayudi which I was translating from Arabic, I began writing poems obsessed with nostalgia, began exploring the ways in which memory can be a sort of violence against the body, both past and present. These poems explore that premise at different points in manuscript—specifically, when the speaker’s memories begin to bite back.