Fady Joudah

My daughter wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you’d get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it?

My chicken pox hotel your machine gun pointillism My bamboo branch severed but nimble name in the air of two alphabets Picassos in bull-light routine Your mantis welded on a pole with a spiral staircase my romance between pillager and villager timed & timely intensity inversely proportional to frequency the chickadees in my voice the thrush in your mouth our polymers of I skipping their archipelago stones Your touchscreen my ringtone heart Your mahogany gift bag puffed with confetti my songs to appear as gauze for a new island

1 Three sparrows in the schoolyard while waiting for my daughter to finish up her play with friends whose purity she will come to question in a few weeks and in that way I am reminded of the president when he speaks of enemies to the other side of the mirror but only in that way the three sparrows ruffled up the dirt as their wings and heads spun motorbike doughnuts after one of them had come back with a massive potato chip for the other two to fight over perhaps he was the provider or wasn’t hungry but simply couldn’t let a good bit of food go to waste Then a crow came and the winner sparrow went zooming into the orange orchard knowing fully well it would be impossible to alight and reappeared with a chip the size of his beak and a flurry of birds descended on the scene (I even saw a Fletcher) but kept my eyes on that little sparrow and am happy to report he kept what his mouth held though it occurs to me he was also mean and the one who seemed a provider might have been yoked in that way my wife during delivery was rung up like a bar code whenever the nurse knocked or the doctor was called 2 In the room there were women Counting up to ten dressed in blue The doctor was also Pregnant in her final week The neonate came out broke The sound barrier and was whisked Away from the mother the father Had cut the cord having held Scissors before he couldn’t turn down The doctor’s offer as if he would Have denied someone an entry Or exit visa Then the women were gone And neighbors and friends had to go To work and the mother was alone With breast or formula milk One nurse suggested the latter Was the better soporific 3 An infant smile A gas tickle The price of milk It goes up in war My son is here to teach me My temperament is genetic His smile is blind It dreams a spandrel Turns opiate in the eyes He grunts impatient wants Gas out as soon as It forms in peace He coos It’s what doves do Though excitable Observant of moving lips Attempts utterance Throws up happy spit And hunger’s renewed

Over treasure and land some texts will say it had Little to do with slavery or the newly Discovered yellow planet Few men watched the glaciers recede From shuttles they had built During the hemorrhage years When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree Or without hands By then doctors and poets Would have found a cure for prayer • Or have you shoved the door shut In the face of the dark? Have you body and light the trap Of retribution doing unto you What it does to others? You protest In the streets and papers and I leave For a faraway land Where with pill and scalpel And a distant reckoning If he should lick his lips Or clench his fist I shall find his second left toe Infected puffy From a bump I’ll lance it and squeeze Out the pus and offer Him an antibiotic I can’t refuse therefore I am • The first time I saw you it was hot I was fed up The second time your wife gave birth to a macerated boy I had nothing to tell you About letting go of the dying In the morning you were gone Had carried your father back to your house His cracked skull I didn’t know that was your wife When I raised my voice To those who were praying From behind the wall to keep it down I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat With a gadget a century old • Anemic From so much loss giving birth If you give blood in the desert you won’t Get it back not your iron pills or magic hat I put your thin Hemoglobin up to the light and called out To the donors Donors If you want to know your blood type And it’s a match You must donate Few came some indifferent to my condition Not having heard of it And willing anyhow • And the world is south The night a bandit with gasoline And I’m your dancing lizard mirth I put my one arm up And bring my one foot down on a hot zinc top The nearest hospital was the dawn She didn’t know her daughter on her back was The entry wound and she the exit She ran a brothel so The officer said Where the rebels came and went And ran into the government boys Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet • He was from the other side rumors Had a bullet through his left arm Or had it bitten off by a camel A camel elephant of the desert never forgets what you are If you aren’t kind to it When I met him his bladder was the size Of a watermelon his prostate a cantaloupe You cannot catheterize A man forever Every hour on the hour his left arm stump Hanging his good arm holding His penis his buttocks in deep squeeze A charge from the rear without spillage This poor murderous thief desperately single- Handedly began slapping his own ass As if he were dashing a stallion in a raid On some unarmed village • The mind in the field The brine in the field Whether I Is a diphthong codependent on What isn’t there to stay in the field The good you act is equal To the good you doubt Most have lost many You are either prosperous Or veteran in the field • A mother offers not necessarily Sells her one-eyed son For an education if you’ll bring him back And stone dust for one With congenital illness And little boy with malaria Same old gas Money mixed with blood Transfusion the doctor’s perfect record broken Nobility of taking A life you Who must walk to and from your house The jeep’s upkeep The donkey-cart ambulance • One boot left behind The one-boot photo I wanted On a book military black the quad a clinic’s Special Forces spun By his dangling heels from The pickup truck rushed To a central town altered combative With two scalp lacerations and blood In his auditory canal I was a lover of loss I tossed The boot in the capital of suffering