It’s early afternoon when you take
to the streets after school.
In this memory, your mother is home
smoothing the creases in your uniform
after sweeping the hen’s bloodied feathers
from the kitchen, waiting until you’re home
to crush the garlic for the mulukhiya leaves.
The block not too far from here always smells
of bodies – the small hamama cooing,
beak breaking from insistent pecking,
rabbits hanging by their hind legs,
skin taut and burning orange,
and your own body, stifled by cotton,
by the ash already starting to spit out
its grey teeth in your lungs,
smoking behind the market again, sun-bent
fingers twitching like dust trying to forget
how your mother was crying
of a dream in which the hand
of every person you ever loved
was reaching for you from a river
whose current surged, their fingers swelling
in the progress, palms barely recognizable,
African Tigerfish swarming again and again.
In this memory, you watch the children yell
at each other as the women clip shirts
to the clotheslines, clouded suds
touching your shoes as the butcher across
from you chops a leg, holds it down by its ankle
on the board, saving the feeble bits of wet fat,
pressing between two joints he can’t name
but knows how to crack apart in one breath,
the thought of which keeps the cigarette
still between your fingers, suddenly overthinking
the motion, hands hardening at the solemn fact
that any bone can whither, fracturing under
the proper tool and with the right wrist motion
no matter its name. In this memory, you never
put the cigarette out, it hangs from your hand,
insubstantial, as small as the space between
two bones, between two dusty lips left open.