be anew

my brother, in the prolonged lead-up to his death, photographed a rose, a rose my mother planted in a narrow garden at my parent's house, where he'd come to live out the remainder of his days i would sit with him over nights, to be a vigilant watchmen of his frail meanderings, a guard against a sudden stuttering fall that morning, the morning of the rose, we sat together on a bench on a porch, and he leaned into me to show me his photograph "it's...

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shidah

destruction, i see, is how they've mended that city in the distant blown-up country, and i think how the sons of abraham have all made a mess of it and his daughters are left weeping i once embraced, with gaiety and without shame, my brother, who came to live with us when we both were greater idealists the muslim and the christian by the faith of our fathers, but to hell...

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my passion

i tried to be as cold as the church wanted me to be when i was much younger and they said i must remove the bellows that fired the passions of the flesh in me dwelleth no good thing, they said, and for years i flogged my inner yearnings down into a loathsome pulp and the homosexuals i knew became stock characters, with their lisps and flexed wrists and flash and bright arrogances and the girls who unfolded into flower before me at every turn,...

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light

a descent of the mind to gloom is that slow wind-down of a senile clock, that dull drip in a country sink, that gray water in a pasture puddle it tightens the jowls and draws the heart into the stomach and aches the legs toward a bed where relief-in-sleep is a fool's illusion. winter, it does not consume, it extinguishes by bloat, crowding my primal inner space, suffocating it by a crawling expansion. observe the fester of a sore, how it begins...

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