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Deema K. Shehabi

 

 

 

Eminent Domain

 

A dusty doormat, 

a wind that evanesces in the mouth,

a history dismembered in the body 

of a sparrow crashed upon the window sill,

a flattened venison on a plate with chanterelles 

in a lake resort named after a vanished tribe, 

an old Damascene house with little snakes

in the holes of its cool walls, 

a rust blemish on a woman’s face

lit up by a surveillance flare in the dark, 

a child with a lucid dream 

in which he runs and jumps 

over acacia trees in the Sahel, 

some oleanders sheared in half in mid-blossom 

in the middle of September—

an abandoned house saturated with yellow mustards 

in which someone scrapes the light 

at midnight and scares the children, 

a ten-year-old with an M16 in Tebane 

who’d rather go to school, 

a conversation with my love in which he says, 

Why weep at the sight of small outstretched 

hands? Tomorrow, we’ll go south—