anonymous

yes, I dropped here from the land of

noise and monochrome, back there every-

thing was magnified to Hermon,

Wadi Hajar, al-Assad and the rest, I’m

anonymous; once we ate mud, ashes and

mortar, lived in houses baked to bronze and

char black, we carried pailfuls back and

forth from trenches spewing flame, gunge and

human blood; once I was swallowed whole

then regurgitated back to living again and things

moved on as before; once I was torn limb

for limb, head, torso, groins, then sewn back to

a piece, misshapen and make-do; once

evenings had the children hanging on by

a thread to tales of honey-baklava, za’atar, or

salvers of  kibbeh bil-saniyeh, growing aches in

the underbelly, mounting shrieks outside of

our nights, the tears were gravel, the eyes stoned

upon the sea of no-return; once I was

born and killed in utero for I didn’t know then

nor will, the secrets of birthing and of

death; yes, I am here now in my 206 or so

scraps and strips, my wedges of flesh, my skin,

my spleen, the three leftover faces that I call home

~~

dads, playoffs & sherry trifle

the widest distance between the thumb and

forefinger – that’s how far removed I grow with

or without you now; it’s all a matter of

puttying the odd crevice onto the strips of those

otherwise evenly painted walls I’m told, and we

could be family again; remember the warmness of

our summer afternoons, wet like the underside of a

tongue whose bloody pinks have blended to pale onyx

now? that’s the span of time between child and

adulthood; and that’s not enough anyhow to wipe out

those creases in a relation now suffixed with the

quintessential ship to it; yes, affixes never last; they

weren’t meant to, nor were roots and root words; they

alter, reinvent themselves, slip to posterity; we weren’t

meant to either; our love was sherry trifle and

crumble when it was and now it eats into us, starting

from head down to the far extremities; we’ll never

shoulder it together to the final eulogies and back, just

as we never did to any back then when I’d waited up

there at the podiums, charged with anticipation and the

promise of many arrivals; yes, mum always did

say I was a trader of emotions, didn’t she? she had hip

replacement last autumn after those ectomies; and she

said she loved the rustle of footsteps up the drive and that

her body reminded her of failure

 ~~