Your initial lines still as unreadable,
Final lines just as your self,
How your words had gradually
Ascended
Into your overwhelming sense of
Shame, sorrow, and fire.
Umbrellas and pity passed me by
as water from heaven
fell onto pop cans and whiskey bottles
thrown on the grass and sidewalk.
When the cascade was revealed
its babble was replaced by
the allegations of cotinga birds
and the pleas of tamarin monkeys.
Sandalwood statue,
you’ve fed yourself to River
Karnali; currents
gnawed everything you are not.
We stood in a row, I do not remember who led,
Who brought up the rear,
But the fireflies raged,
Lighting up the forest, the velvet rocks
every night you ask why I love you
and every night I fail to answer.
Tonight, on Bhasha Dibosh,
I have an answer.
The children double-time,
surrendering keffiyahs and hijabs
to the breeze.
They will not make it.
I would have sat you down and explained, poured
you a mug of coffee and placed it on
that aqua-painted table we bought at
the thrift store that winter in Alaska
Bare every women and rip her on the streets,
And spare not even your mother, own
The pound for murder lingers no more,
Woman carrying basket of pineapple
Atop her head, hair like an Arabesque carpet
Woven with a million coarse black threads
children who had eaten breakfast
with their mothers took their
supper with their ancestors.
There is no relief, no getting over this heat,
so I settle down and stare into the sky
