The following is a poem written in a Green Windows Creative Writing Workshop.

Her eyelids close. Her deep lashes touch the
highest part of her cheek & my hips, my
hips are building a thousand
figure eight motions

into a kitchen full of scattered

lavender buds & rugs the color of sandalwood
& eyelids of such delicate souls. Eyelids
that have sixteen small rivers that don’t flow because they're not
rivers, they're skin softer than the milky

stillness of a glacier - any glacier -
at dawn.
I try to trace & chase these veins in all of their directions & I can see
it & I can smile at it
& I can marvel in their cascading simplicity because my hips are still
moving & she’s still
breathing the breath I know is a sleeping breath.

She hangs a majestic sari on their saggy clothesline. Two days after
they met they tied rope.
They turned screws.

They put something together that

holds things up.
3 cotton napkins. 7 pairs of Hanes boxers.
A bunch of t-shirts. Some are for cleaning & some are for wearing.

She read today about a miraged city in Turkey that doesn’t believe it’s
clean to put cloth that
was used for cleaning alongside any other laundry. A culture of
cleanliness 100 years after the Ottoman Empire dissipated like a wet
piece of newspaper & faded itself into nothing.

This city. Four years after shit in Syria really started to balloon &
spiral & balloon & twist & feel bad before it felt worse - this city now
has neighbors stringing clotheslines concocted out of old shoelaces
& pottery pieces. Threads of cotton from one side of the

quote unquote
border
& threads from another.

Fabric that has felt

war-torn alleyways &

war-torn pastry cases &
war-torn floorboards

& fabric that hasn’t.

And there’s those babies. Those sleeping babies whose
eyelids are a scattered lace web
woven by a spider whose name is Innocence & those babies wear
clothes

that come from clotheslines

in places where bombs & drones & distance & migration & fleeing &
burning &.