a garden of irises now grows where my family’s
favorite shopping mall used to be

in the end, i learn, even time
surrenders itself to memory

in my dreams, i watch women who raised me pack
faded family photographs into emptied pillowcases

like shadows children trail blindly behind parents
on the road to refugee camps outside the country

a woman uses my face to trace in her memory
what my mother looked like as a young girl

long before the first gunshot went off
in the middle of the city.

another blows prayers into her son’s face,
before he leaves for school

on the news, terrorists threaten to start killing
kidnapped train passengers.

elementary school teachers protest with placards
for unpaid salaries. cameroonian government

complain of a surge of asylum seekers
most of which are from my country. during visits,

i hear victims of bomb attacks on hospital beds,
empty endless rivers of curses into the deafened ears

of the government. hundreds of exiles get lost
in the sands, trying to cross the sahara desert.

after the stitches are removed, a boy stares
into a mirror at a face he fails to recollect

as his own. in a documentary, doctors struggle
to hold back the blood jetting through

a splintered vein in a girl’s neck. on the cityscape
a dark cloud spreads silently like a tumor under an eye.

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—after Frederic Edwin Church’s “Mt. Ktaadn”

because the trees carry no names;
because the peaks spear the sky

like nails biting into familiar mangoes;
because I had not spoken Tagalog in weeks;

because my mother had texted me a picture
of the first red berries of our aratilis tree;

because the painted cows bowed like the cows
on my grandfather’s farm, their jowls

sagged with age; because in the second before
I read the description, I mistook this American

mountain for the gentler slopes of Mount Makiling;
because our myths believe Mount Makiling is the fossilized

body of a kind goddess or an alternate Calypso
spiriting men away into marital happiness;

because, like the boy in the corner of the painting,
I had also trusted our aratilis tree to bear my weight

those young evenings I had plotted to leave—leaving being the central
conflict I assume he has also chosen; because, like me, the boy would not

withhold anything from a goddess who whisks him home;
because, like me, he could grow to forget time’s distance;

because from that distance our lives held
the same inexplicable element of loss.

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We lack the lexicon
to commune with rising rivers
or decipher omens from driftwood.
But the winter beetle
beset with dusty drought
remembers the river’s rhapsodies.

When bridges wash out
do we purge neglect
that bottlenecks our restless recall
and do we steel obstinate
while gathering indifference
like ancient cockles at lowtide?

The upper tips of redwoods
blot the morning rolling fog
startling clouds
and the pine needles
reinforce bird nests
turn brittle but warm
at the higher boughs
of ceaseless cyan.

Come, brother banana slug.
Hither, sister hyacinth.
And consider, cousin caribou
that we make amends
and remember our familial bonds
linking us toward half a chance
at avoiding an easy extinction
together.

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The turmeric colored wall suffers
Sand streaks from a harsh wind
That whipped minuscule pebbles
At little red ants crawling on its side.

One bright one with a bulb on its
Back inched towards my arm.
The bite shot a stinging heat
Up my arm. Inside, grandma

Smiled knowingly at my pain
Stricken face. A sugar salve and cool
Towel eased the pain. I looked
For ointment, but she laughed.

This is Sudan, we use what we have.
Sensing a long story, I pulled

A chair onto the sand-ridden yard.
Strangely, the bite had numbed

To a memory. Kids swim in dirty streams
And survive malaria all the time. She stared – can you?
But she went back to peeling onions,
Scattering skin the ants would soon devour.

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For Ezra

We were born
on the same day.
Under a full moon,
in a cold snap.
Through a series
of continental collisions
at the headwaters
of the Rivanna River.
The doctor said
get out of the bathtub.
We were born in a bed
with stirrups. In a room
with bright lights. We were born
before we knew better.
The doctor said push.
We were born: passengers
on a boat, brimming
glasses on a tray, sweet and sour
spheres on a passionflower vine.
We were born under the same
sign. Mirror-dark, thrown back
by a body or a surface
of light. The doctor said do you want
this baby to be born today
or tomorrow. We said
today. We were born
at the same minute:
11:55 pm, in a city
entirely independent of any
county, in the autonomous region
east of the oldest mountains
in the world.

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Three things: I’ve never been to
a funeral, a man is his own
prophet in the morning, a door

floats above an endless horizon.
But I have walked through hospice halls,
I have stood at the edge of a cliff.

I clear my mind with coffee
and the gentle caress of a breeze.
At the ocean a seagull

and a helicopter disappear.
Everything is in harmony
or there is no such thing as harmony.

At the ocean and there’s a hole
in the sky. I don’t want to think
about the people I love

dying. The best time of day
is just as the fog starts
burning away. A door

floats above an endless horizon.
I don’t ever want to go
to a funeral. At the ocean

we all turn to children.
A group of migrants
sewed their mouths shut

at the border because their voices
fell through a hole
in the sky. It’s been said

we know less about the ocean
than all the cosmos; the shoreline
is a border, the moon

a dictator, and I don’t want to think
about the creatures lurking
thousands of meters below the surface.

We laughed in the living room
while Mayté patiently
died in her room. We took turns

talking to her alone because she had
one foot over the border and we thought
maybe God could hear us through her:

take care of her, let her have peace,
don’t take her, not yet,
I love you. Come to think of it,

I’ve been to several funerals
but the memories went through
a door that floats above an endless

darkness. Staring at the coffee
grounds at the bottom of my mug,
pretending to understand

tasseography, I see my face,
two countries, and a bright
emptiness surrounding everything.

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