Sideways upon her exploited bed, surrounded by waste stone
and scoria, nodding off, she asks me to tell her a story.
By which she means a signet from the nights when she was pretty
and as untouchable as she was desired.
I pick a West African falbe: gold, blue, green, and coldest silver.
Way back when is when it way back was, hobbled horses
in granular movement across a postcard’s sepia void,
sweat smelling of rancid butter in a windowless room.
She had a way with servants, treating them like family,
never learning their names. The unreadable laundry girl
spun the shooters of an abacus with a click of her blue nails,
summing the depth and width of the Abu Gharadiq basin.
For a song, bread, payment of her keep.
She folded with one slow hand, kept track with the quicker one.
The slim bolt of cloth gave back the solid porous weight
of a phallus in detumescence.
The movement of the narrative was deliberate
around the soft seeds of individual words.
Words to be avoided, words that caused sudden pain,
memory scissoring through nerves like malice or toothache.
(A library tossed overboard, into the fogged warm waters of the
Adriatic, shade of eucalyptus, swallowing world after world.)
Sleep’s flinch, her features settling from fatigue to death.
Molested wasp helicoptering above its shadow on the hot sand.
From time like a rich vein, fed off into candescence that,
from this other side, starks and snaps to utter black.
As vanished as the delicate instruments which once sniffed the
Ifiari for its intestinal riches, telltale electric quiver
snitching out the hidden seam. The girl spins.
Carnal, astral. A star exploding above the fields of Eden.