Saturday, January 6
AND THAT FAST, YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT THEIR BODIES At a rooftop party, you dance near every edge. Someone drops a ring in glass, in your head the clink of a used bullet, still hot, and that fast the rooftop is covered with wires, riflemen, and you’re thinking about mutiny, MK-47s, two cities clawing at each other’s bruised throats while boys try to hold your hips, keep dancing. The war is on your hips. Your hands. You wear it all over. You wrap your hair in it. Pluck it from your eyebrows. The rooftop is wide and caring, too rained or sometimes incensed, and you never once think to be afraid of what could arrow a cloud and kill it. You eat volcano rolls, pink pepper goat cheese, and the war enters you. You stare at Still Life with Flowers and Fruit and the glade of roses scream war. Here with a doctor and your pregnant aunt who hasn’t yet learned English, only speaks in war. Friends in Greensboro get picked up by bored police, get beat up for no reason, and those fists carry war. At a job interview, you carve yourself into a white-known shape and that renaming is a kind of war. You take a passport photo, told to smile without teeth, the flash a bright war. You’re on the other side of mercy with your meadows and fluffed spillage, where nights are creamed with saviors. Here everyone rests on roofs graduated and sung, gazing at a sky that won’t bleed them. At the beach, you’re buried to the neck, practicing dead, snug in your chosen tomb, gulls flittering on all sides, waves fleshing closer, and that fast you’re thinking of a grubby desert girl who placed small stones in her scarf, shook it back and forth, said, This is what the sea must sound like. (Threa Almontaser)