MR. EL-YANABI ERASES MUNIRA’S SHADOW IN THE PARK

in the translations of Iraqi documents

they tuck in Arevalo’s poems in San Félix

which echo the sounds of the Al-Fatihah on Šams Um al-Fuqará’s lips

Nunna Fatima lend me your spit

because I am an ignorant woman

I bury myself in Averroes’s books without opening them

I am no longer an attentive houri

I am neither gracious nor enraptured

breath fails me

and now when I love you I feel around

to where my prostheses

have been scattered

as if I could be a student of Ibn Àrabi traveling

from palace to dune

to pay homage at his tomb in Damascus

as though I could read or chant

poems read only by

the sleepless

the lonely

sons of beekeepers and soldiers fleeing

the Holy Father

Alina, who sees whom we will become

old women, girls in Inwood’s shelter

heeding

the chants of Algonquin capped by those scalps full of bees

and Dominican co-eds from Harvard

whose grandmothers reach safe-haven because of debts

with their desiccated saint

sleeping among relics

on Cabrini Boulevard

when we grow old in the Hudson

no longer do we hear stories of

elected assemblywomen, queens who rarely prove inexpensive

in the journey of tribes

bartering with other tribes

Mr. Al-Yanabi—Sabbaghi’s friend from Casablanca, friend of Gasca now

a translator, grand detourneur de mots of the Chaima

of Itúrburo, the one from Guayaquil

of Tenreiro

from La Coruña—has forgotten me

disappearing with today’s men

where we live

unless I were to speak to his birds

if they would fly back

once his war is over

Francisco Arévalo every morning