Genre: Poetry

Before the Onslaught

What is an ear, but a snail shrinking inside the head? 

The city crawls with men in safety vests 

& hard hats. They swing from ropes, 

climbing long ladders of dust. What’s sadder 

than being

No boats hovering on the river

and the scattered trees hide behind 

a sky-wide sheet of cotton.

Only the fence rises black in the whiteness. 

The birds that chirped in the early morning fall silent 

and the light

Jesus was one 

but I am not thinking about sheep

rather German ones

because a woman from the synagogue

has two beloved pets

of her eleven-year-old twin sons

and she has cancer and is in hospice

and

In the Mojave heat moved like a fever 

through light as if the dusk promised 

another lake just ahead another body 

of palms whipped by a last new moon 

night’s fanfare of black ribbons

listening to the city at night i trace the glow of its breath and 

without light we dance shadow and pour through one another. in 

hearing, in feeling, in arms’ reach.

Conceived in Kuwait, born in the South,

first memory is Damascus,

and the first and only time I saw Palestine,

I stood, bare feet on the pebbles of a dead shore,

reaching for a

This is what it looks like. To be moving in

every direction at once.

Punching through July heat

I must have lost my keys. Kicked in the door

and locked it behind me. Another