The Tea and Sage Poem, and: Dog Food

The Tea and Sage Poem

Dear poem, today I learned that the man who had made it to his wedding wearing only one shoe, after dropping the other while running away from soldiers, was caught days after his matrimony and sentenced to three years in prison. While he was a jailbird, his young aunt, who was not considered a direct blood relative by the occupation forces, would take his sister's id, claim she was his sister, and visit him with a fruit basket once a week to report back to his kin and kiss their cloven hearts.

Each time a soldier asked her to state her name, and just before he looked down to match the photo with her face, the sister-aunt would spill the large fruit basket on the floor, and like clockwork, each soldier would lose his or her cool, start shouting at her in mutilated Arabic to "gather, gather, clean, clean," as if they were Hagar talking to water in the middle of the desert. Then in disgust, before verification was complete, they'd hand her back her papers, shoo her inside, and spare the place from turning into a fruit stand.

Some soldiers knew it was all a hoax and didn't care as long as they were on the easy side of despair. Old Faithful went on for three full years until the husband's release. A couple of years ago, the ex-prisoner's wife, who made him tea with sage on their wedding night, the tea he drank with one shoe missing, found herself holding their newborn where drones and jets had bombed the city again.

She ran outside the house so as not to be buried under it. And once outside she kept darting into open space. Her husband reached her in an opening between two rubble heaps. She was unable to move or walk, her newborn alive in her arms, latched on to her dry nipple. He carried them home. She's in a wheelchair now. Her body refuses to ambulate. Traumatic Spine Disorder, they call it, translational injury of all that pummeled earth.

She also refuses to speak. Some of the women in what remained of the neighborhood told her mother-in-law that it's understandable if her husband went looking for a new bride. But the husband's mother said "Why should he? She waited for him once. It's his turn to wait. Besides, they're real happy. It's you who can't see it when you visit them for tea. She may not speak but she always sings. She finds what she wants to say in the lyrics of songs, old and new. She can carry a tune. And he replies to her in kind."

Dog Food

Since he came into our lives opossumpoop is a dried-up well in our backyardstone echo

The wound is a well no well's foreverno four-legged creature spottedis allowed not even the buffer zone

Hopping leads to boogiethe contested space squirrels roamas they endure his terrorist barks of innocence

his sprints that lead to the wallhe pivots his claws intoand the wall he can't

Once inside he hovers around the kitchenpersistent bugger for allspice and sumaclicks the spoon that feeds him

Though sometimes another hungerchews off the earpiecesof my stethoscope