The Twenty-Ninth Year Read online

  Wasp like my husband’s father. The right spoon, salty gimlets, a lake

  house in Maine. Wasp like plane, nosedive.

  Don’t you understand, my hair is the army.

  Two soldiers at the border. You can throw a rock if you want.

  One of them pretends to read my passport.

  He wants me to remove my belt. He wants to know why I’m here.

  Common Ancestors

  Echolalia. In the center of the shipwreck, there.

  There the invention of one’s own body. There the heliotropism

  of something stalking east to west, a boat slicing its own shadow.

  I play this immigration like a viola. If I forget Arabic,

  then extinct is my grandmother, her lentil soup, the photographs water-

  mottled, on the back الشام scrawled, and the year.

  My last day in Beirut. Gridlock like a metal snake. An ex

  posing for my camera, a wine bottle behind him.

  It will be knocked over in five minutes. His eyes are shut,

  teeth gritted. In this foxhole I was born twice:

  hard and sober, steel piercing nose/lips/belly,

  voodoo I stole from a darker woman. When I came to America,

  white men took me to their mothers. I became proof,

  mute and pretty. Spare underwear in my pocket like a firearm.

  When anyone wanted to sink the day,

  they called me first. Even the hospital gown had a lace collar.

  I forgot that Zaynab came before Fatima. I drank on the first day of Eid.

  From roof to dirt, say hallelujah, say hallelujah:

  I’m a convert now. I’m a land waiting for my new, westerly name.

  Chaos Theory

  The coming is a machete in your mouth.

  The sex took us to downtown Baltimore.

  The television brought us the floods.

  The refugees ate water; the president apologized.

  The green-eyed woman asked me to define jihad.

  The window let rain in. The man dreamt of Oaxaca.

  The grief billowed and the morning slit through.

  The tunnel cosseted men. The land became a feather

  and the feather found your mother’s black hair.

  You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.

  Too late, in other words.

  LOUISE GLÜCK

  Honeymoon

  Of this room remember heat. A fight with my father and

  glass evil eyes. The television sparking like a glamorous fish.

  We’ve turned off every lightbulb, fan each other with foreign

  magazines. I take photographs of stray dogs. In the car,

  the Turkish driver listens to horse races on the radio.

  I won, he tells us. I dress like a pillar. I want to burn the verbs

  I mispronounce to the Egyptian waiter. My uterus bleeds from Athens

  to Istanbul and the moon is a spider tracking its white mud

  across the sky. Orange blossoms open like pepper in the courtyard.

  Everywhere, blue rooftops. Antibiotics for my infected jaw.

  We take Rome with us to Rome. At the passport control line,

  you tell me to let you speak. You tell them I’m with you.

  When I Bit into the Plum the Ants Flooded Out

  I’ll dress myself cheap as a red candle. I’ll keep my hair long for you to yank. Slink myself in black. Silk panties. Bangles as bright as India. This body is yours more than mine. The trees are broken into temples, one slow noose to the next. My breasts smell like cigars and perspiration, you have sparrowed into my arteries: heartbeat, dial tone. You remember, yes, the seeds we ate by the handful, the Mexican sun finding us wherever we went. The world doesn’t want loyalty, so what’s the point of asking? The heart spoils the body and the body spoils the air. I stole your name and at night, alone, I whisper it into the dark: the vowels none of my great-grandmothers could’ve said.

  Instructions for a Wife

  I’ll be beautiful. I’ll wear the wrong skirt the right way—

  thigh-high and blooming to the crotch. You’ll pass through me

  like bad weather. Can you see the stitches of the handsewn curtains?

  That’s how I touch you. Another woman left an animal inside you;

  I feed it crickets. If I build you a piano, you let it rot.

  There is rage in the whistling kettle. There is rage in the lopsided cake.

  My name waits like an obedient clock, meant for another season,

  ticking away in your mouth. At midnight you are me

  becoming my father, an explosion of sheets. I sleep with my thumb

  against the crown of your head. I want to be forgiven,

  so here my lips bright as pennies, here my bra shed on another porch.

  Your country likes my hair long. My tits small as a boy’s.

  My mother taught me how to dance in an empty room,

  heels clattering on the tacky linoleum floor. My mother taught me.

  I’ll cry four coats of mascara off. I’ll dress the trees with plastic bags.

  Come winter, come Lent, I’ll cock myself like a gun.

  Gospel: Newlyweds

  Love, let’s give Athens another chance.

  The entire city smells like burning. The closest honeymoon bed is the

  ocean. Some nights we sing

  and some nights we fight, fold napkins into blue and green origami,

  how

  is it that a year sounds less than forty-six days?

  Marriage is sweeping the floors of a room you’re not sure you want to

  die in. Therefore. Therefore I

  slip the ring onto another finger, sneaky as July. Like land once water, a

  body that flouts itself, the dresses I

  outgrow fill two garbage bags. I want to see if the house I wrecked

  is my own.

  Marriage is hoarding matchsticks in the driest season. Neptunian blue,

  your memory palace of comets and Spanish moss, my mouth open as

  we dance, love-hoofed, grinding like two sequoias remade

  into one.

  Don’t you know? Some mornings we can see clear to New Jersey, the smokestack towns, the noiseless twinkle of ambulances that have nothing to do with us.

  Gospel: Insomnia

  By wife I meant hotel towels I steal to scream into.

  I married that white cotton. I married a man and wore a white dress.

  It has been five months and every morning I marry a white pill.

  The man dreams of computer hearts. I count the sirens.

  Ask me what I mean by brother. First tattoo. Moon that wants nothing

  of you. The last perfect fork.

  When this is over, what will you make? he asks.

  Magnets. Blue chandeliers from which animals swing.

  A dreamcatcher of teeth and turquoise. Talal, I’m afraid.

  I’d like a hammer and a fifth of vodka. I’d like a starless night,

  an empty lawn, no one around for miles.

  From the lip of the harbor, the ships are winking their lights into a

  Morse code of this.

  The elms have heartbeats, too. It’s easy to forget in the city:

  the silky bed of leaves and moss, the birds, the Atlantic

  freezing our toes. In the dream Miriam is always ten.

  Some things will ruin you, your grandmother at the wedding,

  the ex-boyfriend who hit you with the hand he later broke.

  There is glass on the kitchen floor, hundreds of

  little pieces, something I cracked and left for you.

  I want a heaven with furniture my grandmother will love. Mozart in the

  background, a single plant that blooms the same purple flower over and

  over. She will ask for its name, and they will tell her Fatima.

  The Temperance (XIV) Card

  For Jamaica, for Ru

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sp; Highway 17 in Texas: we stop to watch buzzards

  supping on roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a

  Persian rug of emerald and brown, wolfish clouds

  gathering rain. The towns stack up like a tarot deck.

  A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines,

  shake the static from dresses. The fortune you believe

  is the one you’ll get. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled man

  at the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoods

  speak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south.

  You might say this is about exile, mountains eroded by

  six hundred years of women’s feet, the heavy press

  from babies and water buckets. Forty miles south,

  mothers find their daughters’ bodies in boxes.

  The dusk is a murder of magenta and indigo

  against the black land, as monstrously beautiful

  as a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman names

  the dying plants. She reads the cacti like an open palm.

  Even When I Listen, I’m Lying

  How many men have I taken. Swung from the tips of my fingers. Led to a lake of silk-wet sheets. The lovers of gasoline, brick dust, the zenith of this twenty-ninth year. Their hair plastered with late rain. In a red pickup I sit with a black-haired woman who calls me mama, let myself believe her talk of border-crossing, her gritty fingernails tapping my forearm. She tells me that she died on this day, in a past life where she was a curandera. The bartender kicked us out; I let her lips skim my earlobe. Yes, I am domestic. I love my husband like a fire loves Californian brush. But there is nothing like two women quick as jaguars in the Texan dark, our madness catching up to us.

  Step Eight: Make Amends

  When your husband asks why you’re crying,

  say something about so much life you don’t know

  what to do with it. Apologize. Say you’re a jealous car

  on a scenic freeway, and maybe it’s the tide you want,

  or the lilac grove, or the jar that reminds

  you to tip. Apologize. Say you get like this sometimes.

  The leftover pills taunt you. You realize you hate French,

  you’ve always hated French, you don’t know why

  you keep trying to learn it, this city is no Paris;

  you’ve always been a spiteful girl. Your husband makes

  you eggs the way you like them, salty and burned.

  He is clear as water. He thinks of despair

  as the highway deer one kills out of mercy.

  Scream that he is an asshole, that there are girls you’d

  be kissing if it weren’t for him, that you are trying to

  Pottery Barn your way to quiet. Apologize.

  Start a letter to someone who is dead:

  Sometimes I want to drive all the way to Connecticut

  and sneak into someone else’s empty pool,

  sit at the very bottom like a teacup.

  End the letter with a line of x’s. Some winter mornings,

  your husband wakes up early and sits in the dark.

  He waits for the sun to lumber its way to the apartment.

  This is what your wedding vows meant by unalike:

  He can kill the deer quietly.

  You wake up everyone you know in America.

  A Love Letter to My Panic // A Love Letter to My Husband

  You’re as pretty as a shark. I never thanked you for the

  supermarket flowers, those September windows opening

  and shutting like eyelashes. I don’t get off

  on pain anymore. I understand now why the one coast

  ripped into two; sometimes what’s left of a good house

  is its locked door. You walk from the East River

  to tell me that bed isn’t big enough don’t beg probably

  it’s worse than that I’d rather not when it’s over

  it’s just dark. I told you not to listen when I said no.

  You’re the one who showed me the sad lights of taxicabs,

  the sigh in that Jenny Lewis song. You made me up,

  all heels and mascara. You love the instrument you refuse to play.

  I’m Not Speaking First

  Please. I wore the mascara for myself, to remind my eyes

  they’re green. December, old friends for an afternoon,

  and still I remembered you like Beirut: unmade beds, Marlboros.

  A thing that never wanted me. Nowadays, I can nest my husband’s grief

  inside me like a Russian doll. The smallest one is a black oval seed.

  Maybe I was wrong. You wanted me thin, so I ate. You wanted me sober,

  so I drank. I’ve always liked my lies. When something pressed against me,

  I took it fast. I don’t have to tell you twice: Listen,

  I know I’ve made a mess of everything, I know it’s too late, I’ve stood

  on your balcony, twenty-five floors above the cars and billboards and dunes,

  my eyes suddenly filling but instead of speaking—god, that chain-link against

  my back, you cradling the billiard ball you taught me to hit—I spat,

  a full mile to the ground. You know me. I’ll spin my bruised hipbone

  into an affair. I’ll play with your new daughter until the sun sets.

  Back in Manhattan, when I do dream it’s of octopi, tentacles twisting

  their purple suckers around my finger like an engagement ring.

  Nothing’s Freudian anymore. A cigar’s a cigar. I want to love something.

  I want to love something without having to apologize for it. Please don’t tell.

  Step Four: Moral Inventory

  I wouldn’t have been able to answer your question anyway, and so I pretended the car honk was for me, leaned as far over the balcony railing as I could before thinking of Daniel, then stepped back, trying not to say maybe we’re supposed to hurt each other or of course I’d like a drink sometimes, the hard skyline of the city glitzy in the distance, all the people we’ve known and fucked and left, and maybe I’m more like Manhattan than I want to admit: prettier when lit. It’s like when we walked home on different sides of the same street, and I crouched beneath a car to see if you’d notice, and you didn’t, but that doesn’t really tell us anything, does it, only that sometimes you pay more attention to the streetlamps than to me, and I do the same, like yesterday when I tried to meditate but kept humming that song instead, and I eventually gave up and watched the birds, hundreds of them in formation, a dark V that swooped and pirouetted against the rose-pink dusk, and for a moment I finally shut up, prayed only that something so beautiful would know that it was.