Elsewhere

Highway-speed winds 

Zoom across softball

Fields where 5-year olds collect

Sand in their hats behind the tee.

Elsewhere a mother's womb 

Explodes red, gelatinous, quivering --

Propelling infinitely--

Struck by someone else's war game.

Sweaty Kindergarteners

Return to baths and milk 

And cookie-crumbed 

Pyjamas. 

A breath away, porcelain   

Shards of infant flesh,

Gathered in wails as if souls 

Could be reglued.

Lullabied 

Tales soar over charmed 

Pillows and moonbow 

Vectors. . .

Lifted out of the shreds,

Refugees from paradise

Wonder if maimed dreams will ever run again.

April 19th, 2013

Desistentialism

Dear _________,

2005 must be a year of Februaries –

              Dull paper hearts wrapped around flowers

Nobody ordered,

              Or an endless stream of e-cards greeting

              Over-flooded wiring –

Rain just enough to drench

Your hem and disconnect

Your cellular-digital-ether

Communication.

But not enough to quench

              Your parched oceanlessness,

              Not enough to drown in –

              Immerge, dissolve, to Un-be.

Not enough to fill

              Your daily nutritional vege-fruit

              Requirements,

Nor to keep the lack

Of calcium deteriorating

Your feminine bones,

Nor enough to hydrate

Your cuticles bleeding and cracked,

Dry from too many silver and red

Foils expressing

No heat, no salt,  no earth

Soaking up cloud-spew.

Dry from asphalt consuming

Ozones of people

              Whose breath after breath of constricted living,

              Metaphorizes the enclosure of death –

Dry from the distance

Of Paradisiacal springs

Taunting the hopes

Of my un-angelic lips of clay...

2005

Must be

A year of Februaries.

Zahra bint al-Qalam

2/15/2005

JAM ALA KHUBZ

JAM ALA KHUBZ

a silly poem about (the diversity of) jams

--

There are all kinds of jams:

Golden State Freeway traffic jams and homemade handpacked

raspberry jams.

Diwali in Westwood jams and Qawwali along the Bay jams

Study for your midterm exam jams

And all night after-finals jams.

Organic poetry jams and locally-grown blueberry jams.

Philharmonic jams and Asian Film Festival jams

My computer is jammed and I can't

Get on the Internet please-help-me jams.

Nourouz jams and non-fat sugar-free low-calorie jams;

Caracas jams and harmonium jams;

How to order couscous in Morocco jams

And when to serve Tahini as an hors d'oeuvres jams;

But the best kind of jams

Are the pre

Pared peanut butter & j jams

That come in the jar of

Sandwich spread

Striped like the flag of our diversity

You can serve on room temperature toast

Or freeze, topped with a banana, which

Melts like ice cream in the cavity of your

Mouth

That jam

Is better than the soul food of the South.

----

"Make food. Make music. Make like a crazy lover. But never ever make war."

Zahra bint al-Qalam

5/16/08

The Nature of Clouds

You cannot change the nature of clouds :

Wet, and dark, and cold.

You must change the nature of yourself

To walk in the swamps of sky.

You cannot draw light

Out of the pearl window of storm –

Inset in the gray-white-gray

Evening between rains.

It is your own lantern

That brings fire

To the earth below.

 2/20/2000

Zahra bint al-Qalam