Her blunt fingertips tremble, feed calico beneath the machine's needle.
The weary engine sputters and moans
as the Syrian woman lowers her foot to the pedal
so tentatively, as though the Singer may buck and gallop.
I hover, murmur encouragement.
Her layered scents - oud, rose - comfort me like someone else's lullaby,
and the warm, granular voice,
whose grandmother?
Tawny, timid, she shuffles
across a scuffed linoleum floor, crisscrossed by snaking extension cords.
No more, she says and shoos away the fractious machine,
spreads a dainty doily, then stacks homemade honey-and-pistachio delicacies,
brightening the squalid community center
into a dress-up Sunday parlor.
She has seen gruesome things, I think.
Handfuls of bland chintz should be no trouble?
Or shadowed by decimated fields of cotton, patterned in blood.
Originally published in Pirene's Fountain, "Bridging Divides," Volume 13, Issue 21
The refugees are taking selfies in front of a poster
of the Statue of Liberty
whose patina-green dress and visor my child will wear
to trick-or-treat after dark.
Thank God for Snapchat filters - we are so much cuter now,
with pink kitten ears and whiskers,
experts in fatuous autobiographies.
"Spas, spas," the Kurdish mother exclaims and claps.
She unwraps
her hijab and hugs me
when I offer
hand-me-down fairy-princess gowns
to her sprightly daughters.
"Squeeze closer, everybody. Smile for the photo!"
Originally published in Pirene's Fountain, "Bridging Divides," Volume 13, Issue 21
When you paid your call to measure the crops,
the farmer set his dogs on you.
Those black beasts tobogganed through downy depths
like lithe seals carving froth,
their panting shadows - and yours -
stunted by high-noon sun.
Harsh fiddles sawed your panicking mind,
yet still your keen eye gauged
bales of spun pearl that shimmered,
crushed to milk beneath your sprinting step.
The farmer's pipe-graveled laughter
peppered your progress
toward a truck bed's asylum. Its rippling
red mirage beckoned in the sere heat.
Now you tell the tale again and gift us your scars,
sixty years healed.
Rapt grandchildren's upturned faces -
their awe is your prize.
Originally published in Saw Palm: Florida Literature & Art, Volume 15, Spring 2021