POEM

The Fight For Freedom and Love On A City Sidewalk

 

Hopping down the block like the sidewalk’s on fire,

a puppety girl trips as her left foot flaps,

and goes spastic airborne, fearless

of falling

though her mother dives under her to fix

it with her body and paranoid love.

The catching motion the mother produces from love;

Has a baby tumbled from a window of fire?

Her hijab and jilbab ripple but with pins are fixed

against any instance of flapping

exposure, of wings without synch, of falling,

the mother, the daughter, the suck and surge of fear.

That’s the life of mothers of broken children; fear.

Mothers of rioting cities, husbands spat loveless

from bleached bone buildings like tongued rice fall

and are flicked into the outrage of citizen fire.

But insurrection is not for the US. Here, we flap;

flags and garments in wind gusts, fucked up synapses that don’t fix.

Flags, broken brains cast aside unfixed

just bide, fabric, liney meat, ticking, waiting for fear

to reveal itself, giggling behind a flap,

a flag, skin, bandages, banners for love.

Mothers, dictators, kids on fire;

every body falls.

One fall

I learned my kid can’t be fixed.

My brain was on fire.

I was throwing up with fear.

I was immolating with love

for my kid, who does that thing, that tell-tale flap

same as that marionette girl on the avenue, the flap

of her skinny fingers, splinter factions, falling,

leaping streetward? Don’t crash your face, Love!

Mothers by muscular uterus fix,

hurling handfuls of gravel shouting Fuck these thousand fears!

New York is on fire and nobody knows; Egypt, in front of everyone, is on fire.

I love my boy, how his toes flap.

The scarved mother loves the girl’s grimace, and we fall

to fixing them; mother is love, work, and fear.