Chorus (7 page)

until we became the crosses that broke his spine.

Tell me how hate became dogma,

how love became an international distress signal.

Truth? God is a cutter.

She parades slash marks around Paradise

and plays with asps in her spare time;

call her Cleopatra with a mortal complex.

On her last bad day,

she lucid dreamt the Matrix and called it “Earth”

because “Gaea” sounded too easy to fall in love with.

She is in love with energy.

(She only gave humans sex organs because she confused us with the trees.)

Truth: God is a woman with Body Dysmorphic Disorder,

but she can come back if we let her-

stop superimposing our rough drafts of God

onto an unsuspecting deity

because she is running out of room on her arms

to carve an identity from.

Still workshopping the theory of everything

being birthed in her belly,

she hasn't gotten to existence yet.

Save sexuality for second grade,

for she is just learning to spell her name

in kindergarten calligraphy,

and I guarantee it looks nothing like

Jesus or Buddha or Allah,

like Krishna or Moses.

It looks like
big-bang theories

collapsing under the weight of change,

like a little boy finger-painting forever with a smile on his face

and it sounds, suspiciously, like home.

You are the sweat on the brow of a mother

in her thirteenth hour of labor.

You are the fickle fingers of a child grazing

a splintery fence midday.

You are a sixteen-syllable sentence uttered

by a woman with beautiful lips.

You are the thousands of end-of-the-world

kisses in constant exchange at each

terminal.

You speak and rain falls upward.

You blink and butterflies dissolve.

There are shells of people out there trying,

each day, to become an atom in the vast

dance of your movements,

to seek the mode in the range of your

emotions.

You are
bottled
nebulae with a cork

that is waiting to pop

You are lunar flora: prickly pear cacti which

fill craters steeping in a celestial marinade

hailing from the Horsehead.

And should you stand beneath the sun for too

long, the land which surrounds you

would recede
into
the
dark
recesses

from whence it came,

and the soft luminescence of your eyes

would suffice to lead your way.

We learn in grade school,

that there is a finite amount

of matter on Earth. All that will ever

be on this planet, already is.

And there will never be any less.

It's a hard concept to accept at first.

Because every last bit

of my grandmother's body

seems to be gone. But in fact,

science says, even if you cremate

the arms and legs and ribcage

of the person you loved,

every molecule is still here,

it's just that all the space

between
the
bones
and
the
blood

is now eliminated, and so,

someone that used to take up

a whole bed, now, fits into a shoebox.

And my best friend's daughter,

seemed to just start growing

inside her, as if she came from

nowhere and nothing,

but in fact, she is actually,

all the hamburgers

that her mother ate

for nine months

transformed into fingers and toes

and green eyeballs and golden curls.

And the only exception at all,

the only way for more matter

to arrive on earth is if
meteors

or some other astronomical objects

unexpectedly
glide our way

to
land
on one of our islands

or in one of our seas

and that's what I think

I want to liken Love to,

at least for the metaphorical

purpose of this poem.

Because when it arrives, it does so

with an
other-worldly
crash

into the
continents
that are

our chests. And it is so strange,

so new, that I cannot believe

it was here all along, disguising itself

as some other thing.

I know, science says, Love is not matter,

but most days, it feels heavier than rocks.

And what I want to know

is where it goes when you

feel certain that you cannot

find it anymore.

There are ex-wives all over

the world, who at one point,

promised everything they ever knew

to their husbands,

allowed children

that were made of half of him

to swim inside her,

and drink from her,

and she thought he was a miracle,

better than any other answered prayer,

and then he destroyed her somehow.

Somewhere along the way

he forgot how extraordinary she was,

stopped seeing the certainly amazing

parts of her, and now

she hates him with a fever

that could cook a stew.

But where did all that Love go?

Where does it sit now, though perhaps

quiet, changed, but still with the same

number of atoms and molecules,

once as big as a mountain, now as small

as a seed—but it has to be here

somewhere, right?

I my
s
elf, have Loved in a Large way.

Love that
w
as the size of an army

of dinosaurs, and now, I feel nothing

for that ov
e
r-and-done Love.

I almost, cannot even remember

that Love, I have to read old poems

and inscriptions to find
p
roof that i
t

ever was. But it has to be here

somewhere, right?

Maybe I will find it

under the rug
, or swept

into a corner that I never visit,

or inside an old compact.

I suppose I may not even recognize it

when I do. Perhaps it is just

a spoonful of glitter now, and when

I come across it I will think it is

some
eye-shadow
that I forgot I bought.

I will maybe just shake my head

and wonder why I ever thought

that it would look good on me.

I Love in a Large way, right now.

And if I wake up in the middle

of the night
, and look quietly

at the Love that sleeps beside me,

I cannot ever imagine

it leaving this
planet
for anything.

I am certain, despite what science says,

that Love is matter, that it will

never go away, and never get less.

I am also certain,

that it was not here all along,

and instead, it came
dressed
in
flame

from outer space.

I fasten my mouth around yours like a plummet

from the bow of a sinking ship.
Suck
the red wine

from your breath until it hurts, until good memory

rises above us like
God-ash
and nothing is real

but your tongue, your coiled breath banging

the rusty screen door of my throat like a moan

that breaks free
and dance
s across the dark.

The sticky shiner mooned around my eye socket

like a rain cloud waters at the touch, you pull my t-shirt

delicate as knifepoint up and over my head. It stings

where his pinky knuckle carved out a chunk

in my lip like a wood splitter. I am a hazard tank of bruise

and shame; you are a prayer that remembers how to listen.

The coin-edge crest in the crook of my nose

where that lonely bastard's ring trucked into my skull

beneath that streetlight is still open and pink,

unstitched cartilage cursing at the air like an armless demon –

you place
your lips
on every part of me that has retreated

to a corner I never thought I'd find, soft and new,

whisper
the
names
of each wildfire hue

beginning to eggplant swell and settle into a tornado

around my eye.
I love you,
harder than ever

and am overflowing with words I do not have.

Again. We are naked as morning in the black of this

brilliant summer heat.
Wrapped
in the tree-trunk

capes of each other's wordless mouths like animals,

clawing from the water at our feet.

As if, I too, were in the bayou I kill a fly
in
my hands & stare

into the elm       blood from my cut

lip on a
bottle    s
omething moves and we call it Evenin'

rolling over in her slip    of shade and nightsound               as if, I too

were in the bayou           sweat lit underlantern    the body's tender

meridians       you close your teeth on       something bucks

in the switchgrass       who else but Evenin'

shaking
loose
her blanket of prey as if

I too, were in the bayou how    first I rip tissue from the bone

then
break
its sweet white horn

I.

Outside my window, through the orange drapes,

I can see a
light
on in the building facing mine.

It is late now, an hour past when well-behaved

citizens will have gone to sleep, and I wonder

who it is that finds themselves restless in this

perfect
heat
. Perhaps it is two people, lying

next to each other on the mattress, sheets

thrown to the
ground
, knotted on the floor. It

is too hot for lovemaking, surely. Too hot even

for touching. No, I am sure they have both just

been lying there awake,
sweating
into their

pillows, breathing in the muggy darkness, both

hands placed by their sides, fingers spread

open. They have both been lying still, one

of them
desperately
trying to fall asleep, the

other measuring the distance between their

fingertips, waiting until the humidity becomes

too wet, the
fire
on the skin too near; waiting

until this moment to turn on the bedside lamp.

Deciding finally, to honor
th
is kind of a
rou
sal

with something other than breath.

II.

Most days, wakin
g
is the
h
ardest.

But it is also when Poetry arrives—

stands patiently outside the shower,

places its hands on the mirror,

wipes away the steam.

And then there are days when

sleeping is the hardest. The fight

o
f
muscl
e
against world b
e
comes

so constant, tha
t
surrendering

to slumber doesn't promise

nearly enough relief. These are

the times when hands feel nothing

but empty. And these

are the times when the ceiling fan

is left off. When this heat

becomes the only lover

to hold, the only weight

that feels familiar anymore.

III.

Tonight, I raised my hand to my face

to brush away an untamed curl of hair,

and when it slid past my nose, it smelled

suddenly of you. Not your cologne, or

the soap
you
use, not shampoo or aftershave.

That skinsmell I find tucked into your

neckplace—that late afternoon nap's shadow

that rises and fa
ll
s, rises and falls against

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.

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