95 Immigration poems

In the desert, the moon shivers. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll cut my feet with glass. Outside Oaxaca, in a clinic, my mother said, “I hate your Indian face.” In the dream I’m running. My limbs skeletal and scabbed. After my mother’s death, I found, in a box, her wedding dress. As I lifted the lid, a stench corkscrewed into my nostrils: the dress had curdled like milk. During the day I gather tinder. Paper. Shed snakeskin. When the last light above the mountains knots into stars, I crouch under mesquite, make a fire. Sometimes the moon stops shivering. Sometimes I tally what I owe. In the dream I’m running through a hallway. The floor uneven. The walls green. Last month, as my son blew out the candles on his cake, I noticed, for the first time, the hideous shape of his nose. Tonight I’ll pinch my thighs to stay awake. My mother, in the clinic, said, “The rain has a fever, it needs plenty of rest, it needs to drink plenty of water.” The doctor scribbled in a file then asked for more money. If my mother could see me now! My feet bloody. My face darker than ever. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll sit close to the fire. In the dream I stumble, but I never let go of my right breast: an urn heavy with my own ashes, an urn I’m lugging God-knows-where.

nodding tho' the lamps lit low nodding for passers underground to and fro she's darning and the yarn is weeping red and pale marking the train stops from algiers sleeping tho' the eyes are pale hums in rhythum w/a bonnet on lullaby a broken song the sifting-cloth is bleeding red weeping yarn from algiers lullaby tho' baby's gone the cradle rocks a barren song she's rocking w/her ribbons on she's rocking yarn and needles oh it's long coming from algiers

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer, wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds, and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this august ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain, a contamination of American Standards by something foreign and unhygienic requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says, I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you'd make wider washbins, anyway

The kinship with those humans who speak directly to me is webbed to the ceiling. An economy of satellites, a cosmos, where revision we think comes without the benefit of our witness. A peculiar time when stars with modest faces sleep in enormity and mirror death like a child’s infirmity that despite socio-economics is still an illness, definitive as fading paint grossing a distant understanding from a stain pooled from its center resonant of some terrific nucleus making sense of its own words with the strangest electricity.

It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off   being as far apart as, say, son and daughter." She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?" That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild. "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says. "That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...." "And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top, and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us," and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.

The tide’s a Bach cantata. The beach is the swollen neck of Isaac. The tide’s a lamentation of white opals. The beach is free. The Coke machine rusted out. Here is everything you’ll never need: hemp-cords, curry-combs, jade and musk, a porcelain cup blown into the desert— stockings that walked to Syria in 1915. On the rocks some ewes and rams graze in the outer dark. The manes of the shoreline undo your hair. A sapphire ring is fingerless. The weed and algae are floating like a bed, and the bloodless gulls— whose breaths would stink of all of us if we could kiss them on the beaks— are gnawing on the dead.

I never had to make one, no sickening weeks by ocean, no waiting for the aerogrammes that gradually ceased to come. Spent the babysitting money on novels, shoes, and movies, yet the neighborhood stayed empty. It had nothing to do with a journey not undertaken, not with dialect, nor with a land that waited to be rediscovered, then rejected. As acid rain collected above the suburban hills, I tried to imagine being nothing, tried to be able to claim, “I have no culture,” and be believed. Yet the land occupies the person even as the semblance of freedom invites a kind of recklessness. Tradition, unobserved, unasked, hangs on tight; ancestors roam into reverie, interfering at the most awkward moments, first flirtations, in doorways and dressing rooms— But of course. Here in America, no one escapes. In the end, each traveler returns to the town where, everyone knew, she hadn’t even been born.

I was so afraid. I couldn’t escape it. It was bigger than me and 3 horned. It dashed for me and missed and missed again. It leapt for me in my skirt. I was younger than it. It opened its parent mouth and I could die trying. It would never never miss me. It would stand on its two legs and I was its message. Running hands over this country’s pantalones. I’m still surprised by our hulking silhouette. Our hopeful investments and slightly whiny children. Pompous jars of mustard in the fridge. We as blunt as gum under tables in restaurants.

What if I ate too much food     there being Not enough money    immigranty And save all the ketchup packets    George Carlin record on the record player saying how many ways you can curse and they are all funny   (small brown bird with a black neck and a beak full of fluff for a nest) The old joke: “How many feet do you have?”     Instead of “How tall are you?” This looks like joy     a joke who looked at you and laughed Look at the map upside down    so that south Is north and north is south it’s the other way around because it’s the commonly agreed to thing    (visual language of the colonizer) or snowful awful     tearful wishful

Cherub-bee-dee how does a man who doesn’t read English well know that cherub-bee-dum those aren’t really words-bee-dee. But birds. Cherub-bee-dum, he stumbles, reading to me by the sliding glass door cherub-bee-dee, through which I watch my brother play in the dum-dum-yard. Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum, like how my father says Fine then! Leave! My mother shouts,Stupid! Dumb! We live in a small bee-dee-nest too, one hallway to bee-dum-slam doors. Birds? What are birds? Thanks to my father, reading with me, I have more feathers. T-H-E. First word he ever taught me to pluck    ... It is a word used all the time. Cherub-cherub-bee-dum! The mail.The mailbox.The school bus.The the. He asks me to read the mail. Not birds,mail. If you don’t read this, you will turn into birds. And I read it to him the best I can. The end. A feather. Two feathers. The. The end. Mother, mother. Repeat after me. Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum! We read together before bedtime.