Bed with Metal Arms 

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Her shirt held flowers. 
She said again yes when nothing was desirable. 

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Alone in that bed,
her legs without muscle kept wavering.
Their exact flapping ripped at the air.

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Her hair was still thick, skin worth admiring.
You have to keep these details close in your mind.
It was one sunny day

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after another. The rest of us whispered: 
at the sink, the laundry, the porch.

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The oxygen tank claimed her in call-and-response.
When her voice went slack, I sat by the bed

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with its metal arms 
and promised what was ordinary, what would continue. 

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Of course there was final paperwork: one last 
signature, the time 
of pronouncement at the center of morning. 

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After the sinews and tendons released against harm,
I sponged the body.
I turned her over when no one else would enter. 

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Perhaps then I understood what was withheld from us. 
We were still in her house. Some ate, 
or chose a prayer for lunch. 

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I could hear a beeping outside    and a lawnmower. 
Nothing was wrong. 

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On Harmony       

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Train stops and labneh and the grim little sun and our clapping 
all morning and later we slicked down to righteous
dance moves, pink greasy boxes of dough. Some would say 

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we were not divine between us but we hummed our shared holy
family in a quarry of folding chairs. One hour skimmed 
to another and they were not forbidden, or clarified

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with reason, but the ache of the olives and responses 
rendered in timbal, qanun, tarub, the oud, and the sounds again
of distress and truth. Darwish said “Nothing is harder…than the smell 

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of dreams, while they're evaporating.” On those days we dressed 
in our blacks and thick tongues, and the narrative 
we offered was not an acceptance, a raging. We wanted to forget 

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to kneel. We spent the days linked to our divisions 
of oppression and we fixed to the matter 
of beginning. Every thought claimed five wounds. Dresses loose

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with their fine threads, red and lime, 
wheat gold. Outside, a stone bridge watched the great river 
weeping, a mother sang to her baby. My taste in the mouth 

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of this crowd. Habibi, our losses, and most of us rustling 
our arrows beneath them. Five times a day we ate all the oily 
sweetness with our vigorous fingers, our tongues moving to cumin 

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and cream, and we passed from news to a chapel 
of pita, to portions of dusk, our ghosts and marginal angers. 
I took 48 photos of shadows in quick succession, 

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thinking one better than another, and saw in each photo 
a lapse to spot evidence. I deleted them 
from my memory which wanted not to hunger 

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for these compulsions, statistics. We were taught 
so many instances to doubt, but the light came along 
singing and we joined it, taking its melody as apology. 
 

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Talking to Himself          

 
               Teratoma, 2014

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The specificity: to walk, to walk again, 
to stair the house, to leave the couch. Not possible 
to kneel, to stab 
the ground
or bend. As if each inch 
no longer needs a door, 
you give the limb. A part that moved. A gift 
—or was it 
a betrayal? You give the hardest
loneliness. Insist to give it
to understand this world.
Out the back door, hedges.
All light on boundaries. 
Again you wake tilted. With what’s left to you.
What is not. And you think only how it is 
not to think 
a leg. How we can walk 
with our minds. You’re sure you can 
do this. Be not ruled 
by your elemental framework: bone and cartilage. 
Remember the first day in winter, wavering
weather, femur, the fourth debridement. 
The bees are audible at your neighbor’s garden, the next trailer. 
Hungry, they are drinking. 
You focus on the geography 
of waiting. You wait. You are drifting—
patella, tibia, fibula, remember tarsals. 
The future is a remedy 
that can also be an emptiness. 
Outside now, birds 
greet each other, twittering birds
run away each time you look. 

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Author's Note:

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"Bed with Metal Arms" was first published in The Más Tequila Review.
"On Harmony" was first published in Pleiades.
"Talking to Himself" was first published in Two Hawks Quarterly.