
Dissolution of My Father
Inpatient Hospice
You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.
I breathed through your infamy
at graduation,
mingled, carried my orphaned part,
discarded in a scattering
of peers.
Your socked feet shake now,
betray what you outran:
weakness.
Face compressed to grooves, you
strain to unriddle me.
Your neck, the bruises,
an ardor of decomposition.
You mouth Yoplait,
stilled by the TV’s shifting colors
where an Olympian spirals.
A nurse checks the infusion.
I can’t piece
the fragments
we are
to make you solid
and keep me safe.
You cut my lyric free
of source.
My Mother’s Faith
Your tarnished wound. Uncertain sentences.
Grandpa’s train led to us.
Lament rouses you from mourning. Brand becomes you.
Consummate negation.
A tender orb, Israel.
Anisa Mahmoud Ahmed Ali.
Crushed bodies, milled, unpurposed—
tear of an F-35.
Tiny limbs writhe for mother’s solidity,
explosives loft an ivory trail.
Smoke carries ashes.
Anwar Muhammad Ahmed Al-Hindi.
The Western guardian can’t exterminate
until chanceless newborns distance your faith.
Feel your lines without a nation.
What have you done?
Our flock of death governs itself.
You outwill mass murder, you sacrifice me.
I’m not Abraham’s son.
Crying: Process
lanced.
Strands stretch, ripples hunger.
Draw snaps columns in refraction.
Friction in soft muscle, the nerve,
gloss on a membrane: archway exposes weeping.
Shutters absorbent, infant, blot the boom unsounded.
Liquid dense, concentrate—
contortion composes us,
scorching becomes because causes becoming
chaos and certain retraction, mixed loyalty.
Particles long for reform,
teetering—be not not be—
spark inversion centering force,
bow, deferential to streak,
squelch a charge, change, glint
torn from intricacy,
clasp manumission, shatter in flower.
Barbed teeth drill intrusions and transport
circuits