Poetry

Jerusalem

By B.A. Van Sise

JERUSALEM

نِسَآؤُكُمْ حَرْثٌۭ لَّكُمْ فَأْتُوا۟ حَرْثَكُمْ أَنَّىٰ شِئْتُمْ وَقَدِّمُوا۟ لِأَنفُسِكُمْ

وَٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ وَٱعْلَمُوٓا۟ أَنَّكُم مُّلَـٰقُوهُ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ

I love it when they say enjoy

your stay as if there’s any

other way to enjoy your

every last day. Wait in a sweet

suite, the curtains wafting open

in willowing wails, hear the minarets

sing out survive survive survive and

follow the sirens. At the mosque

I sit at the window, wish for a widow.

Who loves too much is loved

too little. Mohammed was

never near. But somehow his

fragrant fragile foot stepped off

here to his homely heaven of

headless martyrs to barter

for the souls of the five

hundred men stretched thin

to the floor, their soles watching the

doors, and again they are

loud as a drone of bees, beating

their bodies against an empty room. And so

it goes: their throes whisper out uprising

as I swerve out the door, and head back

to enjoy my stay, try to scry my future by

listening to the walls. Wonder if there

is an Allah at all. Fall into bed and plod

off as the woman next door screams

oh god

B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life with Neil Gaiman and Mayim Bialik, and On the National Language with DeLanna Studi. He is a two-time winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal.