One Thousand and One Nights

I dreamt of this, yes, of a city in weather

 

Another place where I am indecipherable

 

A pen with loose ink in my hand

 

When did I begin to have preferences

 

And when did what I tended to draw nearer to begin to blur

 

In the time since the internet was released for use beyond the US military

 

A crystallizing sense of self

 

Even as a new ease pervades the city, the horror of the painted vine atop the medical complex

 

Tho the muted one

 

And from a balcony, a baby

 

And the small sound a person’s body makes in the moment just before they speak

 

The sea, consisting of meter

 

Tho my inability, when asked to explain what I mean by tone

 

As many nights as I have opened, I have closed

 

Sometimes the premise really is too much to bear

 

I’ve come to think that I prefer my hair unbrushed

 

Tho I bought one at the market after learning more of others’ habits

 

Here, a man opens a beer with a beer while holding his phone to his ear with his shoulder while walking, every object and body in use

 

Already, spent leaves drift on the poured cement sidewalk, fungally spotted

 

This unuprootable habit of ending with or, a softening at the end of every sentence

 

Or every sentence made exchangeable

 

Once, I had a lover who described the careful early touches as belonging to epistemology

 

A flat palm and investigative mode, which both excited and repulsed me

 

Here, infants in tights and fitted bonnets wander the streets like serfs gone small with age

 

At this fungible café

 

I feel myself a reptile

 

My little face reflected in between the endless stream of images which aim to hook me

 

How few words I manage to extrude.

 

~

 

Now the cherry blossoms wilt.

 

Now the chestnut blooms are wilting.

 

Now the azaleas are wilting.

 

Is that corn, Ali asks of grass which grows long on the street between us, and I break into cartoonish imitation of my native language.

 

~

 

Tho my mother’s mother’s remains remain at the morgue

 

Tho her death was in the summer, and again it’s summer

 

Once, I was moved to great emotion by the last hours of a market on the last day of the year

 

Then everything else happened

 

Today I wear a dress and trot alone at home, unsure of whether to go out

 

Tho everyone is out

 

The trees, I see, are thirsty, and I’d water them, but tonight there will be rain

 

I pant in hot excitement

 

I always say that I will stop this but I do not, leading me to ask who it is commanding me

 

Or, how many of me are there?

 

The smoke that I inhale clogs me, I can feel the clogging in the place from which speech starts

 

I take a lemon half to cure me

 

I fear I

 

Tho I’ve finally taken up art

 

I produce faint paintings and hang them before my tolerant partner, the jade

 

Furious rain in the wings

 

Against the hacking of the weed whacker, the neighbor over me sings classically

 

Sometimes I emit an aria unconsciously and sometimes, from above, she echoes me

 

Though I’ve never met her

 

Though the other neighbor, housebound, rings us daily, and I go to pick up dark bread for her

 

Again and again, I become hole

 

How many words can you spell with seven letters?

 

I cradle my handy, on average, 95 times in a day, press my special whorl to it to open

 

Sesame

 

Open, Sesame

 

That old phrase a French Antoine inserted into tales he pulled from Arabic and sold

 

A node of traveling stories on which, as it crossed the continents, new layers accrued

 

Sesame, meaning fatty seed, from Akkadian šamaššamu

 

A crop grown at the margins where the other crops refused to grow

 

A seed that traveled fast as language

 

A seed that rang exotically to European ears

 

When I search the sesame seed I receive a local Keto store

 

Sesame, open yourself

 

Thou buff, tan or purple

 

Thou tubular flower, your four-lobed mouth

 

Wanton pod that bursts when ripe, resisting harvest, no wonder

 

I love you

 

The pod of me releasing my timed seeds in my very middle, familial gold around my neck

 

Sesame, open

 

Sesame, Sesame, close