Mismatched as they were, the framboise fig and the patrician bronze nude, they still - somehow played backgammon in winter together, bathed in claw-footed tubs, drank from teapots of infused peonies, silk-stitched napkin borders, pin-tucking their way down a black licorice life. And when the seasons cascaded into warmth, they planted window-box pelargoniums together, the petals of which were the blackest black and the stems so twisted. They painted muted, ethereal hues together, honing sensibilities better left dormant. They slowly crushed diamonds together.

Their love is a well-worn staple now, pared down in style, dusty as Dickens’ dowager, but sturdy like a bone-bristle brush.

On a warm day, you can see them swimming symbiotically, the framboise fig and the bronze nude; her never sinking, him never rusting.

Garlic-pink,
blue-swirled sky
regurgitates
seasons for

me to coarse
through clove-black
seas, lateen
sailed; myrrh burns

evil eye;
shark-oil sealed
planks stitched with
palm-husk threads;

emerald
whorls, flute-like,
play for dill-
fish; my skin

catches kale-
green, digs gold
runnels for
four months of

spring on my
sambouk; I
catch them lit
mottled in

gill-nets, pearls
and fish to
live; and you,
my son, hair

sea-sticky
like palm-leaf
matting, brown-
leather skin

thin from years
of diving,
breath borrowed
by waves that

slurp the shore,
tell me, son,
as you lie
heartbeat-less

on my deck,
how to spare
your mother
these tidings.

And so they sink,
these roses in the mud,

their rich, veined red
mud-splotched,

grey-glazed thorns
secateur-cut,

placid petals smocked in
lurex-like false glint,

glutinous calyxes
swollen like a hirsute moon
stuffed with putty;

they sink cold and wet
in the hot mud, lychées
in chocolate fondue
imbued with effluence
and the sagacity to see
past the ice-floes on the
other side of the tracks
cracked white, past the
parchment-spread
vermeil field, past the
men in beards flouncing
over pollarded trees filching
pomfrets from the sea;

these mud-roses know
that past all that humming,
and centuries of reams,
despite the loss of petals
and thorns, their grey-hazed
filaments are irrefrangible.

I wrote to you on frankincense-scented
paper, green ink frilled, blotted, bruised
with sequined teardrops, and when my
gem-rimmed words oozed out, like resin
from the winged serpent-guarded
frankincense tree, and solidified onto
the red-earth paper, buckling into
schizophrenic calligraphy, morphing
into crushed-velvet roots, the green of
that unripe-mango skin I peeled for you
the night you left me for her, preferred
her new rose-petal skin to my crinkled
coriander-sprinkled rind, the green of
my devoted Friday lunch mint-infused
overcooked okra, the green of this abbaya,
oudh-soaked just for you, when my words
oozed out – oh-so-green – onto that
scorching red-bulbed paper, I thought
perhaps, for once, for the sake of
shameless years and endless dark stark
nights of service, you’d read, listen, soften
enough to send me all five of my children.

When one squints, the other
dims the moonlight for her,
such is friendship, or so
your parents think, heedless
of limbs that tangle like
limp honeysuckle petals
in the early evening,
before the sky darkens much,
before the muezzin cries
the day’s last call for prayer,
before your mother uncovers
the shallow depressions in
your mattress made by not one,
but two daughters of Muslims.

In peacock-colors I swarm around
your moth-winged presence

My plum skirt swirling and spreading,
blotting out the moon and all those
black, brittle stars

My skin seagreen

My breath expunging your splintered
desires, spice-searing the dregs into
shriveled seeds that float down runnels
stained red-black tonight

Did you think day would bring
lucent crystal globules of another?

In febrile-colors I swarm around
your cider-soaked hue

Peppering your path with
a mother-of-pearl sheen

My knotted, disheveled hair
whipping mosaic chips of gold and
silver onto your turmeric-yellow skin,
pock-marking your face into a
chalcedony ring

And still I wonder, as I swirl around,
smattering color here and there,

Why your eyes gnarl like that
as they rest upon my floral smile
and for whom – pray tell – you’ve
cherry-sprigged your Lilliputian loins?