Take Me With You to the Mountains
BY RUTH AWAD
Is it true the dead are so modest
they require a shroud I’m dying
to know if privacy is even a thing
when you’re everywhere I read
we call our afterlife Akhirah and
our heaven Jannah there is no
sadness there I can’t imagine a
life without sadness what else
could bring you to your knees
and would I miss the sharpness
either way you’re in a grave
until the Day of Judgment
facing the qibla three handfuls
of dirt three days of mourning
did you know your daughters
weren’t at your procession and
did it hurt even if it’s custom my
father watched his brother carry
your body from his phone’s small
screen that’s what happens when
you die in a pandemic an ocean
away his grief rippling out through
waves and satellites did you like
America and did it hurt you that
my father never came home did
you ever love him like you loved his
brother Teta it’s so hard to be mad
at the dead I think my father will
mourn you until he’s gone when
he talks about you he does so
like he’s telling me about a person
I’ve never met and it hurts if only
because it feels true I feel your hand
on my spine to straighten my posture
you insisted I should be beautiful at all
times I was just a kid and didn’t understand
beauty I still don’t I kissed your hair
and smelled mint I kissed your soft
cheek I held your soft hands I didn’t
know I would never see you again
Mother Of
BY RUTH AWAD
God bless the Mitsubishi stuck in snow again on I-65S
that traveled great lengths to bring my mother back
to a state she hates with her whole heart because there’s
nothing good about Indiana – her words, not mine, though
if I’m being honest, Indiana is the only place I would not
live again, home of my first kiss with my friend’s boyfriend –
let’s face it, I was not a good friend and probably not
a good kisser – home of the eggs my first-grade class hatched
and home of the chick I adopted with my father’s confused
blessing, the chick who would become a rooster hellbent
on crashing the next-door carwash each night, much to my
distant mother’s amusement, to remind the good townspeople
we were, in fact, not like other families, and home to my mother
almost never unless you count the short stays at the Budget Inn
one weekend a month. Oh my mother, I can almost see her
standing in that long driveway now like she’d been summoned,
like she was too cool for an entire geography, all eyeliner and combat
boots, a babe to end them all, an avenging angel for every lost
girl who grew up in an unglamorous place, and when she packed me
and my sisters up in the car that wanted every day to die, she blazed
out of there on its last breath, her hair streaming out the cracked
window like the flag of a ship warning you to stay away.
The Chariot
BY RUTH AWAD
About eight ounces, the weight
of the human heart,
and for all its galloping
my heart is neither the horse
nor the chariot
pulling me through the dead
Capricorn winter,
all tooth and nail,
past the stripping birches
in the failing light,
past the crying cockerels
and empty-bellied nests,
until it’s me and the bleating
wind and the wilting scarlet
runners – in the summer
you’ll tell me the aorta
is the size of a garden hose,
your aneurysm the size
of a fig. The future is
a season I can’t imagine.
