What The Fish Say
My godson wanted to go look at fish but I told him, today, beauty is canceled.
We cried. I felt bad. I counted the unbeautiful like broken ribs.
Shrapnel in the olive tree. Child-sized tourniquet.
Saint Porphyrius’ watching and weeping.
My father phones to tell me they’re down to vinegar; they pour into
open wounds. His friend found some wild tomatoes. Cooked them
in the street for his children. Over there, it’s a god-lent shovel.
A murmur in water. The dark between angels is still time spent waiting for light.
My father finds the photo albums to remember the streets that once existed.
My godson has not stopped describing his desire for fish.
Their bodies are neon and possible. The water is full of his daydreams.
I scavenge his tiny wants. And after, I dream of the hospital. Ice cream trucks
filled with bodies. A friend dies on that blacktop like a fish. So few people
will name him. I said today I am choosing the space between angels. There is
nothing left to choose. I sew beauty between layers of skin. It seeps out
without my noticing. When I see it I get angry because how dare life go on?
My godson phones to say the fish are possible. We are possible.
The sky is full of broken windows and so is the dream. My eye sees the way
the past lurches forward, covering ground like we cover old scars.
It says what the fish say: witness me.
by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
from Split This Rock
—A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Rattle, Boulevard, and elsewhere.
Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.