Down through the alleyways of extinction

the abandoned dirt roads where young girls

used to walk unaccompanied

wearing their silk slips outside instead of in

here we are on a lonesome blogspot.

Yes, you heard me.

All the big publishers have moved on

to the big cities

pushing boundaries they said

breaking molds they said

all I see are the shadows of identity

politiks. They took their slips and packed

their bags to make noises in the city

using the sugar daddy model of poetics

gymnastics at 4 am on some old worn

out sofa with Jazz on a streaming device.

We are out here in the country,

enjoying whatever it is you thought 

you found but never even looked for

and that was:  your departure.

We waited because we knew

it would pass.

https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Salah/Wexler-Studio_2-10-17/Salah-Trish_Wexler-Studio-Session_Two-Self-Portraits_2-10-17.mp3

The After Thought

When finally the last words are eaten

and when there's no more 

to fall back on

and the lump of fat that is used

to exercise the heart mediated by the mind,

it is as if the thermo-regulation

of a dog is a more important

organ to the well wishers and naysayers

waving at the hostages

on the way to the mass graves.

My mother used to tell me:

I love you more than all the tea in China.

The day Ron Silliman said this about me: "There were multiple comments in the polyphony of the stream that could be interpreted as racist, especially those made by Lilac, an Anglo woman living as a Muslim in Lebanon."

This was in response to a drunken pair of Filipina poets who went on a rampage because I said Barbara Jane Reyes poetry was not so great but she was exotic looking.  And, she was.  She and her friend Eileen Tabios were also vengeful racists entrapping balding white men on a private site they operated...tricking wealthy old white dudes into marrying Filipino village girls.  Of course, as the Lead Detective on the case, no one at the Silliman Blog knew about the dark side of these two numbnuts.  I exposed them and it led to Ron Silliman taking his toys home and shutting down his comments section forever.  I imagine because he was a total embarrasment.  Coddling two really venomous poets and me....well.  The whole thing happened when I wasn't even there to defend myself from these nasty women.  I was in South Lebanon, no internet, no cares in the world while the bunch of them spun amazing tales of my horrendous White Superiority Complex that was a surprise to me more than anyone.  Me, an "Anglo" woman "LIVING" as a muslim....it doesn't get much better than that when it comes to the outright bullshit bigotry I have faced as a muslim over 40+ years.  

https://carmenisacat.blogspot.com/2006/03/famous-ron-silliman-said-wednesday.html

Untitled/Undated/Also, Ongoing

Someone announces there are jackals in Tel Aviv,

just for saying Jerusalem.

The key to the cities: Beirut and Nablus,

were purchased long ago while you slept

in Long Island.

A journalist fumbles in his pants

for his keys and a lead,

watches Arab children razed,

toilet trained too young on empty cans

carried room to room with the burghul;

it fell in older times from mud kitchen walls,

silos of sand in sand,

dispensing traces of brothers

fallen into wells full with grain.

You in a photograph of a boy

pointing into the deep of the old village house,

the place where you sunk forever.

The UN Sounds Blue

There are jackels out there in the fields,

guarding a hundred ghosts;

dead Roman soldiers

disintegrating near Saladdin's castle.

-a bat skirts through the early morning air

swallowing and swallowing-

The UN makes another patrol

down the thorny roads of South Lebanon

the sun will climb over the horizon

one more time

to make a small history

as if Christ walked here

sweeping for land mines

in the frost cracked hills.

The jackal out back is innocent if we let her be

leave her to her pups.

Their cry sounds like a herd of goats,

or a hundred frogs;

or dying birds;

a plague of locusts.

We could catch one and give it a name

create a race of stray dogs

sought after by collectors of uncommon things.

-but a god damned hunter shoots her anyway-

As bats witness to Rome and Geneva,

the weary eyes of the UN

hide in jeeps and tanks;

big white tanks

their blue flag courses in the wind

flappity flap flap flap,

it sounds blue, like blue flappity flap

in the cold southern wind

full of jackal.