[entries for tone]

it learned to read by being called every name in the book and it wrote eulogies for the children of getaway drivers and it knew nail as the light bulb of a dream journal and it did not know which palm print went with which birthmark on its mother’s vision board and it had its hair pulled out in a cornfield by a boy / god was too / young to have

[entries for Ohio (ii)]

how absence is to me a bowl and to you a basket. how brothers fight over the last fish and the first snowflake. how sisters arrive whole from the museum of shortcuts. how a baby dressed like another baby is not abused. how a father slips a bear into his story of a mousetrap. how a mother points a set of wind-up teeth away from a square of wet cement. how on a soundstage I roll my ankle while you lift alone a magician’s birthweight. how ****. how it listens in a bathroom stall to the click of a viewfinder. how they horse. and ache.

[no animal makes up for lost time]

toothache
come home
I’ll wear
a shirt

[untitled]

why does uncle
love baseball
and throw
so hard

what’s a city

kid I come before you
knowing full well
I won’t remember
my answers

the left hand is for pawing
at the broken
rabbits, these buildings

think god
will jump

who does memory
impress, who

can it warn

/ I left you for nobody else

I felt for the first time
when she left
by then way too late
alone in a motel room  at twelve  midnight
with the neon bar sign outside glowing
the traffic of the bypass
almost singing  a woeful tune a full
ashtray an ember burning my careless
fingertips
tomorrow
and hope so *******  long past
my beard growing  every second grayer
an inch
itching it's way through
like despair
on an express train
to nowhere
again

I
He was intoxicated
by the scent of coffee
dancing in the morning
to his mother’s humming.
II
Then a blacksmith - his father -
taught him how to hammer
form out of chaos
in the muddle of force
and a sweaty anvil.
III
Now if he wished to see
the sunness of the sun
and the greenness of the tree
he would summon the image
of Fatma - an Arab maiden
who was once Berber,
to come write on his face
with her soothing finger:
“Salam, my anguished lover.”
IV
When green-eyed Fatma comes
the wreaths of coffee
Would come with her,
writing in the air;
and all the songs of history
would come marching too,
in battle array,
like an army dressed
in civilian clothing
for a dance in Rio.
V
Fatma’s hair –
a still cascade
of light goldness,
a tide of watery fire,
a flight motionless
of a millon birds who
sing in tongues
and laugh
to the stone unlettered
of his fidgety cenotaph.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN