New and Selected Poems

The Last Night

45 The Last Night Drinking pints of lager and lime like any other night, we talk until the cigarette butts overflow spreading ashes in the darkness. Beneath the table, your prayer beads click as unconsciously as the chiming church bells. The beads shine in your palm like little black eyes. Five pairs stare from the family photograph taped above your cot. Posing on a beach in Tripoli, they watch as we undress. Rigid, distant, and forever wounded, your father stands in the center like a soldier with his troops. Nadia smiles. She is too young to remember her banished brother. Your mother holds a shell to her ear and listens as if it is your voice echoing across the Mediterranean. The shell is dark, smooth and cut open to the forces of the sea. Your body still trembles, remembering 46 your mother’s hand as it pressed your face through the prison gates to memorize it. The last night your eyes search my body as if it is unfamiliar. We speak the wordless language in your unheated room above the blue and orange runway lights where you whisper my name in Arabic when your mind loves with your body. I run a toenail along your arch. Falaqua, you finally told me, is a beating on the soles of the feet. A punishment. Fingering lines of the whip on your back I feel the pain. Scars are your body’s language. Tonight, I cannot touch you without crying. While you sleep, I lie still, watch the sky turning to ash, tighten my fists around the leather string of black beaded faith, and I pray to my God to understand you. To wake you, I touch my lips to your forehead as though you were a baby. When you open your eyes, light falls into my powerless hands. And I take it. ...