Hamra
The bakery opens.
Bread rises like lungs.
I know this neighbourhood
the way one recalls a dream:
blue-eyed cats and rubber tree.
I tell the hairdresser,
it’s time for a chop,
which means I want to love again.
He says to return later
so I walk to the sea’s blue mouth,
its yellow forehead,
this haze of pollution.
Such determined generators.
What keeps us awake?
Bread and blade.
This machine of ordinary beauty.
Years Ago
Your grandmother’s rooftop pool.
Soda cans sweating like thighs.
Everywhere we looked,
another rubber tree rambling.
Where were we?
Motherhood, yes, if it was for us.
The August stink hovered like flies.
I watched you swim and wondered
if we’d be dancers someday.
At night you dipped a brush into watercolours
to attempt a bougainvillea:
fuchsia and flowering like gowns.
Then, a lemon.
Then a basket of lemons with perfect little leaves.
Oh what a long summer. What happy girls.
Today I threw out my lemons, mould-green,
and all afternoon I sat silent. I thought of us.
How we’re not dancers, or mothers,
or underwater. Yes we’ve come out for air,
and the sky is yellow as a decade.
This Old War, Again
A Found Poem After Etel Adnan’s “Sitt Marie Rose”
My spine is like a
twisted, stunted,
fallen tree,
disappearing.
I go out on the balcony.
The birds return.
The port burns.
I read the eulogy
for the anonymous
and the known.
Beirut is a port.
It glitters
on the asphalt.
When it rains
it’s the same,
the roots of a tree
split open.
To discover a truth
is to discover
a fundamental limit.
Time is dead.
I have no illusions.
I want to say
forever and ever
that the sea is beautiful.
