Ghost Crop
”I was a ghost in a strawberry field for five years,” he says.
“The ghosts were plentiful, ‘la fruta
del diablo,’ as they called it, also--
faakiha ash-Shaytan.”
He gestures toward the bowl
already offered, the fruit obese,
spilling. My children rush,
dip their bowls into the harvest
as if soup, heads cocked, miss
my swipes, juices running
into nylon low-pile carpeting.
Later, he takes a drag,
engine humming,
“Next time let’s eat in the other direction,” he says.
“You be the sloping grass;
me, the cow.”
Noise Reduction
Below her lips, dark matter,
amorphous proof:
of a demi-sun
bayer sensor’s receipt
of her chin behind glass
the prism’s preparation
for retina, his
breathing grip
imperceptible click
of capture, gain
and other reflexes,
the colluding cursor,
sculpting harvests of hues
into a creamy, buffed
crust.
Unmonitored, another carver
enters the dark matter
below her lips
scrapes open
variegated color
pits, seeds
inky grays
and ghost blues
with Jericho
majnouna.
After Diaspora
No longer nationalism
nor nostalgia
for revolutions
or plums
but this, I remember:
a frail moon
dangling over
a wedding hall
a bleating road
clambering slowly up
a concrete wall
infested with sheep ticks
myself,
as I used to be
staring over
the concrete wall
the temporary check point
the swelling assembly of garbage
at the moon
as if it were
my own country.
Afternoon Chat
“I almost died, you know,” I tell my sister on the phone while scrubbing spaghetti from a pot.
“What was the settlement name?” she asked but I didn’t know—
it didn’t seem important then.
My dad kept driving, his cheeks stretched, while my mother gripped the dash.
I was half asleep in the back, Simone de Beauvoir on my lap
while boys with long curls hurled limestones at a Peugeot.
That was the summer I learned how to drive—I was 20 and had only just gotten to it,
among other things I pierced my navel in a Russian needle shop
and went home to fight with my mother
and really, I forgive her, it was too much, the pots, the daughters,
the checkpoints that kept on popping like gophers from a hole
and there was no trap at Ziad’s because Ziad’s was bulldozed.
Settlements are Israeli neighborhoods built in the West Bank, in violation of international law.