What if finding manna is the prelude                                
to losing everything else?      

Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha—
morning, midday, afternoon, sunset, nighttime.

Five times through the hours, my father prays.  
His back is bad, yet still, he kneels on his sajjāda toward Mecca.    

    Q. Any religious preferences, Sir?—the visiting nurse asks my father.
    A. I could eat anythings—the leg, the goat, the whole things.  

‍From my cousin, Mesalik, I borrow a hijab, or is it an hijab?—because
Mesalik looks like me, how could she not? We sit here dreaming of animals.  

And we share our Muslim grandma’s name, Mesalik, ‘Aya’ for short,
and gambol in tempo to the woodchucks chomping for baba ghanoush.  

The tall grasses we name for our handsome country neighbors,
but we curious, could farmer boys have smooth hands?—

those Western lessons, root and rhubarb, drawing in circles.
Planets tilt, spin, dissolve into our ears and eyes.              

‍Still, five times through the hours our foreheads touch ground, buzz
such futz from our brains. Five times, even the history of libraries,

of museums—their golly-gee-willikers work vanishes in fog.
Or maybe the entire galaxy deserts us, including ourselves.

But what if the prelude is just a prelude? Anything lost becomes anything else—
manna lifting us as light can do, rivers even. Or maybe heavens descend

and tempt sun, sky, tease beehive hair as we rev-up—the Mesaliks flying
Grandma’s ancient rug from Tangier. We like saying Tangier, or is it Tangiers?  

‍

*A previous version of this poem first appeared in Jabberwock Review,  Editor’s Prize runner-up, nominated for a Pushcart Prize)