Translated from the Arabic by Abdelrahman ElGendy So-and-so brushedmy shoulder as gunshotscracked. So-and-so: I never learnedhis name, so I called himcousin, and that wasenough. So-and-so, who sharedhis last bite as hungerfissured my song. So-and-so, a blurwho saw you safelythrough the square. So-and-so, who frisked mewith a grin, asked,“Is he reallystepping down?” So-and-so who told…
I am ready to have less of loss—a thought that comes to me now that I’m used to having lossall around, shows up as I walk past the freshly cut field near the spotwhere my mother-in-law broke both her ankles, bleeding heartsstubborn on the terrace. Some want the poem to come for themfrom the sky…
a tangle of wings and abdomens slappingthe windowpane. My first instinct was to annihilate them. My next instinctto pamper them, to lay out a buffet of egg-enticing garbage, the shriveledstrawberries languishing in the fridge put to use at last. I wanted to learnto regard the divine not with ambivalence, but the insouciance of my dog’sgroggy…
On the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nailsof Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, theconsequences of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic ofwhich he took more than a hundred pills a day. When Göring was captured, he had a suitcasewith over twenty thousand doses, pretty much all that…
All these ideas, worries, feelings.They seem large.Immoveable, untouchable as the past is. Yet how light they are also, how portable. Even the future—my days still to be spent,my death yet to be greeted. Walking around inside me,wherever I go.
Each calendar daydeserves to feelas rich as the momentan empty month turns over. I wish we could rewind all your daysto when you were still in them. We hold your lost hope.What did feeling free feel like,free of this much sorrow?In some ways we can never be freewhile missing you. Hold the space with us,little…
That one week I skipped just to not stick the pigfetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made mecut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings:Touch my heart and prayto The State. The duplex that owned us.Debts that outlived us.Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people.Dollarstore hotdogs on foldaway traysand the powderized orange…
Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast,a day of sun recast to a scrimof clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitkaspruce, every bough a white shelfbending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flitthrough branches, fly to my palm,a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry theminto the trees, stuff them into barkcrevices, behind tufts of lichen….
The greatest sin—to say of a day: nothing happened. Some days—the greatest reprieve.
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