holy, your body
secular, your mind.

sweetness, salt. I am
so in love with your bite.

taste, tears, eyelashes
lifting to the sky.

my prayer, my book,
my legs, my lips, time.

forever, nothing, fever
dreams, endless climb.

you, the writing, the
records, the cries.

how did i get here? outside of the fishbowl
in the dark trees
in the scary place where no one can understand me
so it feels like soap bubbles are coming out of my throat instead of words
and my tears are making them angry
and my anger makes it worse.
too poor and
too attached to the feelings of lonesomeness
to run away

let's talk about alternate universes
a shattered mirror, shards scattered into possibilities
karmic, cosmic, inevitable results

one planet:
i'm an old dog who rests her head down with a sigh

another:
watching you making toast with an oven, it's raining outside, i'm a dying plant on your porch

one more:
we're together finally and i want you so much still but you somehow never satisfy me enough with your words, like bad lyrics

I have a dream where you
lay still, with me,
watching the devotion of the moon to the
side of my face through the curtain
and we've just exchanged breaths and I've
said some questionable things while high
but you take your fingers to my temple and traced it
down to my jaw, along my neck. Going along the
white glow from outside my window,
and these moments don't even
crease the blankets of time passing on

I can already feel bits of it leaving me,

swirling down the drain. Each sunset,

the garbage collecting in the street, the smells of the

open grills and the handmade bread in the medina,

the last footsteps of the night, the adhan

clearing the noise from my head each time I was awake at 5 am.


my protesting nails, so deep in its skin,

its leaving me!

no words, no pictures, no old and unwashed

laundry or empty suitcases

or twist-tied bags of spices can bring it back to me


the old, the poor, the singers, the blind

the rich, the banks, the embassies

the pool halls, the Parliament

collapsing in on itself,

melding together like

blots of oil paint

a smattering of birds in the sky

I'm enlightened, illuminated by a
man on a red couch

Pelvicly: describing a connection. An encounter that left me

changed, curious, crazed
as if I had just discovered the amazing health benefits of aloe vera after years of suffering

My burns have cooled

I fell into a fear, into honey brown eyes
into a stomach full of breaths
into a pool of whispers
into him

Oh God, again? This unrelenting ache
for your hands and your wrongness.

Scraping my heart out with a spoon,

I've felt the under currents.

Looking in the wrong places for you, in strangers
in confiding my secrets, giving away my affection to
an ocean, an ocean, an ocean

What could I do, resist? Stop the tide of a past going on 10 years?

I hate you for drying out my bones, shell shocking me with a wave of nostalgia

I love you for washing me clean