"From Mohammed, the Servant and Prophet of Allah,
   to Muqavas, Leader of the Copts: There is
safety and security for those believers who

The photograph blanches then recedes then fizzes, like soda on a stain.

Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village.

  The sun beats down as if it were in a frenzy over broken promises. The heat of the concrete and walls seems as if it would begin to howl like Sioux with rifles sold by the bad white men. You drop into your chair like a good man who is deciding what to do next. The Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific drift by your mind's eye. O, daydreams!

As Lorna falls across Freddy, and Bernadette,
who grew up in a rainy village of one factory
in upper New York, a schoolgirl toed and twisted

This is how I began: a delicacy
to my mother, a scallop rocking in
her shell, one in thousands of my father's spawn.

I can see the hooked noses of the owls 
And this is how it always begins. In 
The darkness, everything looking