born by the mediterranean
our mothers bathe us in orange-blossom water
olive trees and cedars
strain to give us shade
we come to america where they call our land
the East meaning different/dark/dirty
we soon forget
our grandmothers combed hair like ours
we wish our hair blonde our eyes and skin light
we know barbie
looks better than scheherezade
we think french makes us sophisticated so
we greet each other bonjour instead of salaam
proud of our colonizer’s tongue
we forget the Qur’an sings in arabic
when we arrived
our fingernails pierced the palms of our hands
we stared at pictures of our children
eye sockets carved out by rubber bullets
on the 10 o’clock news
our brothers and sisters spit up blood and teeth
and CBS declared them “terrorists”
now we turn away from bruises and broken bones
body counts and funerals
we know we cannot help anyway
we forget we once stood on the same ground
they die on
we look for the arabia packaged by the west
we escape into clubs to watch
blonde belly dancers named jasmine
sashay almost naked
we eat pasty hummous at eight dollars a plate
and tell each other
how much we miss our home
Summer Solstice, New York City
Sharon Olds
By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children's father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when its found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.
Poem Written with Issa
Matthew Rohrer
A friend e-mails
how much are you
enjoying yourself?
a dripping faucet
loose cat litter
no doubt about it
a good world
is difficult I say
as if I were
tilling a field
ashamed of myself
I apologize
to the sleeping child
