Dissecting an Iris
BY CAROLINA EBEID
There are different manners of leaving.
Sometimes you hear your heart in your ear.
Yaffa to Birzeit, April 1948.
(cut a vital connection)
When my father tells his story,
he begins by finding his father
at home, its odd signal and surprise,
Why aren’t you at work? Treading his needle
along familiar grooves cut deeper
by each retelling:
(what happened was)
They load two beds onto the truck, fold
blankets into drawers: two beds for six sleepers.
There’s emigration and there’s expulsion.
There’s leaving to return in a few
weeks is what his father guessed.
(gardening, not architecture)
They drive through a threatening
stretch of a colony where armed militia
had been ambushing vehicles.
Miriam sits in the passenger seat
with the baby. There’s the kind of
removal made possible by deploying
soldiers behind the trees.
She turns around to see the three
other boys through the small cabin window
Get down, hide between the furniture—
(اتخبوا بين العفش)
I look through her viewfinder, the boys
sorting their heads and arms among the legs
and feet of the furniture.
(chimera)
Miriam prays to Maryum, mother to mother.
They teach me we’re surrounded
by a cloud of witnesses, my dead,
(deer-like)
their vitreous eyeshine.
Sometimes I’m only listening to his voice,
slumping and crumbling, to the grain of it,
(no returning)
the glottis, tongue, teeth, inner cheek
of the voice in surround sound.
There’s a disarticulated hand, mislaid
(event to be repeated on the earth)
longings for a stupid orange. Miriam vows
to fill the lamps of the local church with oil
as devotion, if they can make it past.
(undertow that takes)
I look through the brown open vowel
of her iris. A disarticulated story, what else
to call it but rage what waves
(rite of return)
through it, inner white part
of a citrus, and ululating uvula.
Winternet
BY CAROLINA EBEID
I’m still working on it, the domed visual field
of the dreamer tiled with microscopically tiny
mirrors arranged in a matrix
Grief technologies, and their technicians
We Bring Good Things to Life
reads the sticker on the audiocassette player
I dubbed telepathy machine
Ritual: play side A, hear how it reverberates
and saturates the room with its room tones,
meanwhile, rerecord those soundings with the phone
Mothers are works in progress,
enclosures that suggest a construction
of subjectivity: nest, ice fort, air-raid
fallout, tent, wind pipe
To write poetry after Gaza—I try to
dissolve, disaggregate, disent-
angle the I out of feelings
Genocide calendar disgust, disbelief, dyspeptic
sleeplessfulness (it’s no longer morning again)
I had a vision of a mother-like figment
amniotic gray-and-gold glow, first
a posture then a face, then out of the face,
telegraphic ribbons of spoken words
Gravity syncs its grace
Which I are we talking about anyway?
Eye, or I, or ai ai, and AI, and ay ay ay
All-vowel grace note, sing with your seeing organs
I close both eyes to trace the root system
collective memory is, taps and tendrils
I am glad she isn’t here to watch what’s happening to Gaza,
Baba says when I play a tape of conversations,
everyone young again
Plant matter of peonies, rose petals, marigolds,
and lavender, and globes of red Gomphrena, striped
outer petals of the lily, forget-me-nots, luxurious ghosts
of jasmines, and buds from the silk tree, calendula,
and chrysanthemum dropped in handfuls over her box of ashes
Her mother would take my temperature by
nestling her prickly chin into the pit of my eye,
pressing in for tens of seconds as her skin read my heat
And my eyelid turned into a theater screen with jots
of silver and green beats narrating a fever scene
Video after video, I see this happening:
adjustable teeth of the land-clearing blade
will annihilate memory
Ritual: on the blank side,
hold record and play at the same time,
record yourself listening
Mother grief is a movement like any water
seeping into paper, turning thick and overcast,
warped and noisy
(aquí se ha hecho ya de noche)
Haruspex Silueta
BY CAROLINA EBEID
The world is such a barrel of bones
such an intimate iced-over desert place
such a reddish cow pelvis held up
against yellow daylight, an underground
withdrawn place drawn up
by a duplicate daydream, a sweaty
paradisiacal place, a sour berry
cedar tree parkour alley space wearing
a river-cut face, the world is
a paradoxically lush oracular
place of sheep liver and video games
and metallophonic articulations
such a bioluminescent world raising
a yes or no question
such a mossy place with a gold fabric
sun disk—to weigh the heart, to read the liver.
