Chorus
Page 6
my sheets, leaving traces of you in every
pillowcase. I held very still, and closed
my eyes, trying to keep whatever particles
of you I had managed to steal, until breathing
itself became too obtrusive, until even my
inhale meant losing you. So then I didn’t
breathe at all, just held my hand against my
cheek, and for a moment, felt that it was you.
44
I’m not supposed to fall in love.
I must submit to someone else’s wants.
At 5 o’clock on Friday evening during Ramadan,
I am supposed to be answering the call to prayer
Not answering his call beckoning me into his room
My hands are supposed to be holding the curving spine of my Qur’an,
Not holding with the curving spine of his neck.
Must I submit to someone else’s wants?
My mother taught me how to tie my hijab.
Daddy taught me how to pray five times a day.
Grandma taught me how to write in Arabic,
& Papa taught me how to recite my prayers each night.
But no one taught me how to fall in love.
I see us in the mirror in his room, and I
Wonder what of me I see reflected back?
His eyes on mine, and we are in the mirror.
I see what they pray I never would become.
His hands rise to my head: I submit to his fingers’ wants
My hijab cascades to floor in slow motion.
His fingers run slowly through my black hair
My eyes never leave my eyes’ reflection.
He says I submit too simply.
My parents say I don’t submit enough.
I feel the smoothness of his cheek and
Reflect on the sting of my mother’s hand if she finds out.
Consequences are of no consequence when I look into his eyes.
During Ramadan, it is said, the devil is locked away in a room in hell,
And here we.
The way he looks at me is forbidden.
His thoughts, my smiles, our touch is all forbidden.
He is my ticket straight to Hell.
This is not entirely our fault, my mom would say.
We submit to Iblis: we give in to Lucifer to sin.
He submits to us that this is okay.
Our thoughts, our smiles, our touch:
I refuse to believe that this is sinning.
My mother’s voice echoes in my mind
“God is watching; he is always watching you.”
I am a Quraish, a scribe: I must submit to write down holy verses.
My goose bumps write in Braille for his fingers.
I read his face like a long-forgotten
Surah: I never saw a prayer more beautiful.
He calls me angel, as mother used to do.
With me and the falling snow outside the window he sees heaven.
I don’t feel this heaven as I submit to someone else’s wants.
Tender kisses on my forehead are postscripts in this call to prayer
Ana Behibak (I love you), he whispers.
During Ramadan, it is said, the devil is locked away in a room in hell,
And here we are.
I submit beneath the minarets of faith and family, us, my religion and my self.
In the mosque of my consciousness, I prostrate myself.
I see us in the mirror in his room, and I
Wonder what of me I see reflected back?
My lips move to pray as I kiss.
Grandma taught me how to write in Arabic,
& Papa taught me how to recite my prayers each night.
I submit to pinning my hijab, to wearing an abaya.
I submit to praying five times a day.
In the mirror in his room during Ramadan,
I wonder if He will teach me how to fall in love.
45
I crossed a river of poisonous metal to get to you.
I wanted so much to hold your glory in the palm of my hand,
and then rub it on my heels
that I swallowed your elements in search of other things.
I wanted to step on your skin
and spread the magnificent shade
thin across my floor,
and drink everything that had ever been
or ever would be washed from your body.
I gave you secrets the size of Guezzam,
with dry springs and no magical stairways
to reach the middle of clouds.
I inhaled as you called me sister.
I inhaled keeping time,
waiting to break blow spit fall out of existence.
In spite of my chocolate and your chestnut,
the pink satin beneath our scabs was the same.
And still, I can’t begin to understand how these streets
could have kissed us in the same places.
We were like ice against fever
and grass between toes in summer.
Always in summer, riding what little wind we could find
and dancing beneath streetlights
and the perfume of loss daughters.
I had rid myself of extra limbs with ink pens
played in your hair, and daydreamed of growing apart.
I had devoted my mornings to your children,
named them,
fed them my milk.
I waited in cool bathwater of blood and lemon for you to come to me.
I reached as you slipped and pulled from my hip,
already in black,
the veil hiding the shadows of our language.
I could not bury you.
I could not dig a hole deep enough to hold us
and I was not ready to leave.
So I wrapped your body in wild silk
and carried you, your weight lovely on my shoulders,
and I built a city, holy enough
round and rising,
and lit the flame.
And sister, not even the ashes could breathe.
46
babbling to congeal what we haven’t written-
the clean fruit, the ground-off teeth
& the trumpet’s miserable blare
a ceremonious lisp and stomp
((STOMP))
we proposed our bed, said under the mattress
living in the disorder of nature, the ellipses redone
a hundred times, charting
our chickens
meant to be executed
the redundancy of each phrase
love,
what was inaudible became actual silence
we are happenings of post-harvest memoirs
47
It could be words
do not exist
to make you fall deeper
in love with me.
Or else they do, but I don’t know them.
Or I do, the words,
but not the order,
the exact proportions of each one
or the secret of how they fit together,
thinking they do as bodies do, like ours.
But maybe nothing
is for you an act of falling,
a hunger, or a hunkering;
like love, which is for me
a kind of burrowing,
a sinking into ripening,
and yet for you is more like flying—
taut wings of the hawks overhead,
circling, now closer, now more apart,
haunting some thermal of the heart.
48
The crow berates the dove on the wire
side by side in the dark night
the dove is silent; the crow screams
the caws echo directly into the farmhouse window
the irate farmer’s wife
bursts through the screen door
she lifts a trembling Colt 45 i
nto the sky
squeezes the trigger and ejects a steel bullet
that pierces the skull of the dove
white feathers plummet to the earth
the once angry crow flies away
and cries to God
“take away my fear, take away my fear”
49
Come to me tip-toeing ’cross
cracked-out
public spaces
collect glass along the way
dump the heavy from your eyes
with the change that slaps against your palm
like a friendly gesture
fill your pockets with hand
outs
and walk proud, talk loud
stink louder.
Lay out like an answer under cardboard
tucked away
newspapers under clothes, saving warmth
against a dying body.
Chase away the cold
and question life.
I couldn’t even meet your gaze halfway
Your poor
cut into my worth
I spin my earnings around purchases
slurping my earnings from an hour hand
and
I can’t spare nothing
no change.
my part time
can’t support your full time
poverty
you work harder than me
my lazy occupies a register
I’m cashed out, checked out
bi-monthly
numb
Come tip-toeing around cracks
and I’ll shake my head
to ward off your words
My eyes can’t meet you halfway
and
I’m sorry
Love is
not enough. but.
a practice
we cannot do this love making
in these coffins meant for sleeping
meant for dreaming
let’s pull the bedding over it all
forget we are confined
drop the dirt
leave the bodies
where we found them.
50
When the fiery feathered phoenix serpent God returns
Waging war on Technospheric cataract eyesore
Scenery, we must nye take refuge in the
Ill-composed stations of metallic vogue
Nor mechanistic time clock on-the-job sorrows
HOW to untrap the caged bars of humanity’s heart?
HOW to unwind years worth of trauma
in this structured reality cube collapsing into chaos?
Popping pills to dull the pain
Pray to God to stop the rain
Nature’s loss is humanity’s gain
Strike a deal with the criminally insane
Striped slivers of schizophrenic writing on the wall:
Dying Embryo- Apple of my Eye- Who am I to Curse the Sky?
My synchronistic whirligig prayer wheel of a heart
Has cried enough psycho-iridescent tears for a millennia
I’m a metaphysical muse in a 4th dimensional world.
Such enumeration of swanly songs last sung
To ticking time bombs of terrestrial blues
Struck chords so Deeply Dissonant
in my Empty Chamber of a chest
As to render my eyes ears and Octopus
deaf blind and stupefied.
Who was the Man behind the curtains?
And why was HE to blame for the whole collapse
Of mankind’s cataclysmic name?
E.T.s have become more Human
Than humans- Soulless Zombie Denizens
Churning in their Pulsing Womb Tombs
Marching to the Rhythm of
Gregorian Calendrical Farse-
Bitter Catholic Tempest!
To name is to know not
the essence of Absolute
But to pin Illusions Resolute
The End of Time is the beginning
Of Galactic Rhyme
The End of Gregorian Slime
A Venusian moon spooning the sun
Cradling lunar labia and solar cock in my
Rosy tipped, spider-bitten lips
Time is fractally, pterodactylly, galactically,
holographically chrysoprased with
iridescent rays of spiderweb decay.
The Sod Iron of Alien Truth Brands
A Hot Electric Cow under a Vedic Moon
The Dominator Paradigm Crumbles
Like Cigarette Ashes on a
Handsome Nazi Mustache
The Warriors Cry, “Valhalla!”
51
In the lightless water of my dreaming,
you are an eyeless totem,
a bagged cadaver papoose, a broken bottle
engineblack and gasoline in water
here is your house, fish in the leafless trees
catfish, barbed, electric and swollen
in tall grass that sways, invisible mover
you do not speak,
and the dead gather in your devil’s chapel
on the bottom of the muddy lake
how you shook like a puppet last time i saw you
pale and grey as hospitals,
as mornings after terrible things
there are sturgeon, fished for with the hooks of cranes
their bellies filled with glistening black eggs, salt fruit
here are the swollen ditches in the spring,
frogs with pale appendages dangling, useless and poisoned
here is foxfire and lantern light
cloudy ice that blocks the sun, the muddy hole
here is your black book of engines, prospero,
that i never learned, here the fire that ate your rotted curtains,
here the broken shells, the fossils in the limestone driveway,
sea bed broken into gravel road, black tar liquid in the heat
here the black, the cars rusted on their axles
dissolving in the mud, here the eyes of mice in the farmhouse
here is a sea-bottom of wheat, a ghost of a pig,
a chickenhouse smell, a flooded field of rotten cornstalks
flying dutchman, saint’s fire, jonah
how it comes behind you, your fury
with its chrome teeth
to swallow you down to hell, you spoon, you feather
you rusty hook in worm
how the fungus gathers on the oak of you,
lightning struck and hollow
ripe and rotten for the fire,
you are sick with prophecy
a scarecrow stuffed with doom
oilslick, poison water
cracked bells ringing in lightless towns on the hour
on the lake bottom, iron ingots strewn on the muddy bottom
shipwreck, worlds’ end.
52
If the world is ending
And you happen to find me
Alone
And dancing
With music-
Shhhh
Just let me.
Don’t step up with
Mouth full of manic ideas
Stinking up my finale
None of that
Right Now or
We Must or
This Girl or This Time or
This World Is Ending.
Just don’t
Trouble me with words.
I’m a scientist darlin’.
So let this dance
Be my last grand experiment.
The one that proves my theory of man and music.
Don’t got time for hypothetical sentences
While I’m dissecting
This agreement with gravity.
I’m too busy reconciling these outstanding debts
With one final payment of sweat and move
Of sweat and shake
Of sweat and promises kept
My ass finally cashi
ng checks
My mouth wrote way, way back.
So as the world begins its final spin
And the rumors of the big bang boom
Into meaning
If you happen to find me
Alone
And dancing
With music.
Don’t speak
Just twirl,
Into this room
Into this dance
Hands up, eyes wide, lips pursed
Into these two arms
Into my great
Wide
Open
53
I was trying to play the twelve bar blues with two bars.
I was trying to fill the room with a shocked and awkward color,
I was trying to limber your shuffle, the muscle wired to muscle.
I wanted to be a lucid hammer. I was trying to play
like the first mechanic asked to repair the first automobile.
Once, Piano, every man-made song could fit in your mouth.
But I was trying to play Burial’s “Ghost Hardware.”
I was trying to play “Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan”
without the artificial bells and smoke. I was trying to play
the sound of applause by trying to play the sound of rain.
I was trying to mimic the stain on a bed, the sound
of a woman’s soft, contracting bellow, the answer to who I am.
Before I trust the god who makes me rot, I trust you, Piano.
Something deathless fills your wood. Because I wanted to be
invisible, I was trying to play like a woman blacker
than an unpaid light bill, like a white boy lost in the snow.
I wanted to be a ghost because the skull is just a few holes
covered in meat. The skin has no teeth. I was trying to play
the sound of a shattered window. I was trying to play what I felt
singing in the mirror as a boy. I was trying to play what I overheard:
the old questions, the hunger, the rattle of spines. The body
that only loves what it can touch always turns to dust.
What would a mother feel if her child sang “Sometimes I feel
like a Motherless Child” too beautifully? A hole has no teeth.
A bird has no teeth. But you got teeth, Piano. You make me high.
You make me dance as only a sail can dance its ragged assailable
dance. You make me believe there is good in me.
I was trying to play “California Dreamin’” with José Feliciano’s
warble. I was trying to play it the way George Benson played it
on the guitar his daddy made him at the end of the war. My lady,
she dreams of Chicago. I was trying to play “Mouhamadou Bamba”