National Poetry Month: Two Poems

There is a Caretaker in Me 


You told me about your throat, 
that it was swelling. You blamed the swelling on your movement
from heat to A/C, the wind hitting your neck 
and all that. 
I asked if you had honey. 
I savored the word honey in my mouth. 
You opened your camera to show me the sea, 
which was restless and pixelated, 
and had swallowed the shore. I joked that the sea was not happy
with the political situation. It made sense to me,  
looking at the sea over FaceTime, describing Jersey’s weather back to you. 
I am writing in a past tense so as to imagine a future. 
Really it is still that summer. 
I have been at a remove, 
wanting for nothing, which, turns out, 
does not mean wanting nothing, but lacking nothing. 
I don’t know which one I am. 
Once, I was a body in a city and I heard my own beating heart, 


which was not unlike your beating heart. A city in which I was a
stranger, and thought long afternoons 
on the beating hearts of strangers. 
The coworkers and I, laughing in all our languages, 
on the clock, discussing what to get siblings and partners for their birthdays. 
I felt I was there by accident. 
Where I spent a year in a dim school auditorium,  
watching children learn to play a kind of hand drum, which meant something,
given that it was the same drum 
my uncle would bring out at parties. His face, gaggled, 
as he played with heart, completely lacking 
any rhythm or skill. 

I left that city. On my last visit to the school, one student asked
for my new address in New York, 
though I did not have a New York address then, 
not that I would have given it to that child, 
whose mind and heart, I felt a sort of care for.
I am not in New York but in my hometown, 
slow roasting lamb and potatoes. 
The cousins are coming over. I intend to dress the salad with my hands.
When the exhaustion sets in I feel closer to the women, those I have known
and those I have not. 
Who made meaning of the locusts 

and the ruined crop. Ya binti, once, I wanted for nothing.
I was open like a window when music came.

***

Poem in the City with Maryam, ya Maryam 


I am knocking on wood at the Whole Foods, 
my mother in my ears, 
saying, there was so much death during the war. 
I hate to see it, especially when it’s young people. 
Today, I called a bereaved uncle 
and told him I would pray for his lost one. 
And I did. I took the train 
to the south of this city, to the Maronite church, 
which was smaller than I expected 
and made mostly of stone the color of dusk 
or shoreline. I am getting better at giving my regards to the bereaved, 
which is an Arab thing about me. 
I take my mask off at a protest and my face 
is an Arab face. Fuck the Arabs, 
I hear my mom say. 
Once, in the wealthiest county of New Jersey, 
I saw an older woman trip 
and fall on her face. I didn’t know what was happening, just felt myself running towards her. 
On the train ride home, 
I look up the health benefits of honey, and the seasons of certain fruits. Pears, late summer. 
Pomegranates, winter. How surprising,  
that devotional red being native to winter. 
Now, I am thinking of the Virgin Mary’s blue,  
her deep breath and sighing. Her work. 
Her, at the window, which overlooked 
a valley not unlike other valleys, Maryam. 
Ya Maryam. As if she were ours. As if I could talk with her about something as simple as fruit. 
By the roadside, exhaust 
gathering on the figs. I know she spoke (somehow, 
I know) only with intention. And to think of her
is to think of war, though 
all the stories forget her of that. 
War in the dust, in the glass pitcher 
of water with the sun flooding through. 
Today my people are grieving 
and I am in a city far away, 
greeting the ground with my feet, eating an egg sandwich and reading Annie Ernaux at the bar 
of a too small restaurant where the waitress calls me, love. And on the train, a man is holding flowers. It is the day of the marathon. I want to ask 
if he is the one who finished the race or if he is on his way to meet his love at the end of a line.