The Fifth One Ended Up in France


-inspired by Harris Burdick’s drawing left w/Wenders



She sat there with her coffee

Incredulous it seemed (to me)

re: the abduction, the beheading

the explosion down in the wadi.

Her elderly husband

nodded to sleep near

a Hindu yonder.

How would it be if I spoke

about the angels and epiphanies,

the series of dreams?

How bourgeois to come all the way

to Paris and be fearful

of using a password

on the internet:

dressed in the requisite blacks

and whites that are expected

of Americans in Paris

-so as to avoid detection

amid the fashionable French.

There, as I observed

a young man dashing to and fro

each freshly abandoned larder

to pay his rent in some

run-down Parisian

haunt, tapping out hope

in case-sensitive detail,

rubbing his hands each time,

a bit Dickens, a bit Faust.

Her poor dog it seemed

would be all alone until ten

in Boca

because of the delays

and that’s all that matters

to someone, somewhere.

I Remember Rasha

Baabdat, September 2013

When suddenly I thought of Rasha there,

between the jail walls and under

the stirring portraits of ladies

in handmade fantasy dresses,

each one from a different place,

foreigners all at home within

these locked-up boxes,

like mix-matched jewelry.

I thought of Rasha there

pulling the dark hairs

from her armpits, drawing out

her long Kurdish brows,

primping for the someone outside

who must be waiting, who sends

us coffee with sugar, for whom

she left her children back home

in Syria along the border.

I thought of Rasha and the way

corruptible people laugh,

inviting tramps and robbers

to suck them dry and move on

to the next home-wrecked

easy to please wife.

I thought of Rasha as she squatted

over the flat hole, eliminating

the insides of herself,

scrubbing her mons, her

heavy white thighs open

and plucking, plucking, plucking

for hours at a time

while we waited to urinate

until she emerged hairless

and smiling, see!  she says,

as if it were easy.

Her smile lit a thousand

dungeon lanterns until

the portraits on the jail walls

curtsied in the flickering

boiler-room light.