The moon, a watery crescent, touched my hairline and I looked up in awe. How many drops from the sky forsakes a single stalk of bluegrass? The miles between the lake and the land dissolves the alien of border lust. What will they say when they see the fortunes fall from the sky, a confetti parade of reassurance, that it will not cave into crust? The next day harp strings sang like plucked chickens. Wedding images blurred in swirling clouds abandoned by Jupiter’s storm. Medusa sits here with a fijan full of cardamom and chardonnay and tells nothing of lipstick pricked behind the ear nor of severed tongues tasting the earth. A minaret hugs an American flag. It rains rice for three days. The Arabic word for texture does not appear in this collection, nor does the word for hope or symmetry. The gum on the sidewalk cracks with the tides and lodges the belly of a smooth jazz snake. The sun loves the moon, and in their attraction, there is some semblance of time. Once they left the cave as young men, the past vanished all at once into an unknown flash of gunpowder dancing across the sky. The future became something simple. During a thunderstorm, the soil breaths like Frankenstein’s monster.  & In the arms of a lover my smooth back arches as bold as waxing moon. I then swallow the sun whole without salt or remorse.

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Yasmine Rukia is a Lebanese-American experimental poet, professional social justice bore and the reigning meme queen of Metro Detroit. Her hot takes exploring the nexus of arabesque america, womxnhood, taboo, islam and pop culture blurring the lines between fiction and futurism can be found on PaperMag, TheRedFez, Cliterature, Jaffat El-Aqlam, and others, including her IG theflowerofcarnage