They Give Me Money Near Karbala
Shebat walks for grain, for soap and oil, and to collect her children, but now she drives—Yassin's Toyota, Yassin who was lost near Basra. She whisks the wheel like she does a bucket lip for sand before she pumps. I drove with my uncle, she says. He let me work the gears.
We want Razzaza—for water, for quiet, for its distance from Karbala. Latiffeh, who sells funnels and lanterns; Shanaz, who teaches school; Homa, my sister; all our children. Shebat bends to see the pedals. Let me try, Homa says. No, Shebat says, and we go, jerking, bucking past shops, the Crescent school, the mosque.
A blue sky, hot and white at the rims, and the high, distant sun. Then, far away across the dry and flat, we see a shimmering there of machines and trucks—pale yellow and brown—like the bread loaves my grandmother baked in her desert ovens.
*
We go as if speed might mask us, as if we might enfold into watery mirage, as if Shebat has searched the earth and it is empty. Dust spits up like the wings of moths. Homa, her lips drawn, shouts to Shebat to slow. Meymanat, her child, wanting to see, or trying to help, or weary of the hard, sharp, riveted floor, crawls between the seats, a hand on Homa's hip.
But then a hole, or a rock, and the van tilts, careens, shimmies like a boy prancing a ball. We mash together, sprawl apart. And Meymanat has tipped across Shebat's feet, onto the pedals—a flailing, leggy knot beneath the wheel and we go faster still, side to side. Homa grips the child, untangles her, pulls her away. Shebat's feet pound harder.
*
I try to remember. The sudden smash of how-many-hammers on a thin tin roof. The oily scalding flame. The burka cowl of smoke. The quiet. The sky, where the windshield was, where Shebat was. And Homa. The children. Blood spilling down the scalloped floor like offal towards a butcher's drain. The child I find on my lap, her long, damp, black hair, her head draped at my breast—Mina, her clothes gone but for one pink, cotton sleeve, her stomach glistening, dense with blood.
A soldier, his black gun wagging, its little round hole his urgent leverage. Shanaz, and the children, bodies loose, eyes fixed and slick like sheep bled fresh for Eid. A man in stiff, clean clothes who says, Go home, and places Dinars, two handfuls, on a small dry place near my feet. Take these, he says, then go.
This poem won the 2013 CONSEQUENCE Prize in Poetry.
