1- On Reading Adonis

You mention “holes called stars” 

You were a farm boy, al Qassabin, the President 

           etc. 

I was from the city. My stars were smaller, 

Brittle things in a night sky like thistle frozen  

Perhaps it was all frosted fields 

You fled to Beirut. I stayed somewhere 

The stars there were flat and bright  

Like a hubcap in the sun, 

Like the pain of broken love 

O my friend, it is your art that kills me, 

The devastation of it and 

           the word-river, the paint and ink 

Drawing my blood as surely  

As it has ever been pulled out of my body 

2 - Insidious at Zero 

Insidious has walked through zero—

a point on the map like the North Pole,

indistinct, uncapturable—

Snow flies through the screen door

of his self-portrait. Obscurum

per obscurius.

He set up a tent

at absolute nothing

on the Antarctic tundra

where he teaches the wind

to spell Horatio,

needing a friend more than words.

3 - Pastora, Huddling in a Corner Under the Bed, Watched

      the Carnage

I am anywhere but here, but I am also here. The wood is dark, the

 fabric rough against my hand also clutching my head, planted in

 my hair. My ears are the enemy. They will not listen to the order

 to stop, if the world will not. They will only leak like a rotting boat

 and let in the seawater of my brothers’ screams. I am breathing

 dust I am breathing. My father is silent now and I wait in the

 cinema of my life, which is over.