from my unpublished second collection
Lebanon, Nebraska
She stares through the window to the garden gate, guarded by Thunderbirds, one on each side, the road
leading out to the highway. I'm waiting until I don't love you, she answers. Puts her cup on its hook. Impossible to dry anything. Dishes, clothes. Your cheek
where the cat licks it clean. So much life other than our own loves the heat, the close nights crackling with starlight, you'd think we would grow fond of it.
You'd think the locusts screaming from the trees, the alien sea everywhere, fecund and vicious, would make us grow fond of each other,
time running out like air from a tiny hole in a starship adrift in the darkness. So sad to grow old without family.
To face your own extinction without hope, or any accounting or appeal. So sad to love and not be loved even a little in return.
Beirut, Beirut
The kids at the New York Disco talk the talk but barely remember the last time foreign flags flew here, though everyone claims to know someone who’s brother died a martyr.
Everyone knows the difference between Coke and Pepsi, Fox and CNN, the latest US presidents and the ones that they replaced.
One day we will rule the stars, booms the bouncer, a retired colonel.
Just ask Little Mehmet, the adulterer, who spits like a camel during Ramadan and eats sweet cakes in secret in the afternoon.
Just ask "Jake," who manages the city's largest McDonalds restaurant, the poor dressed up and the rich studiously nonchalant, to explain the difference
First published in Ploughshares
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