Muslim Neighbor
Trying to ride out this newfound freedom,
All your homophobia coalesces into something
Beyond your control, skyscraper erections going
Against zoning regulations – gotta keep this city pure!
Pigeons don’t shit on our heads near as much
Here, yet I feel distinctly urban, yelling profanity
At your recalcitrant father who never approves
And your mother who cries silently to herself.
If anything changes here it’s the movements
Of your body while the call to prayer sounds
Outside, away from what drives your soul
To stakes inside itself, conflicting directions
And rendering your heart null and void
Like our marriage ceremony yesterday,
Performed at a progressive church
Shot down in Houellebecq’s France
(Lovely weather for some murders.)
If you had died I don’t know what
I would have done – immolation
The closest bet if I gambled
(But neither of us place bets anymore
After that time your parents threw
A Qur’an at your face and the
Embroidery etched a marking
Your face held even as you told your friends
The next day that your face had been
Irreparably sabered.) God – your parents
Didn’t know you did more than gambled
With me that night after we read the sura
Together and cried because we found a
Point of connection between us.
(Our lower points connecting us from then on.)
It was Medinan of course but that wasn’t the point;
What you tried to tell me on the cruise after your
First big break, that I take in too much
(I am foremost the receiver but that’s also not the point.)
At the expense of my friends and family
And that we can’t leave our families behind us
As if we exist in separate universes,
(Theirs being more spacious and green
And ours being an eternal hell where
Tantalus sodomizes us endlessly
While holding food in front of our faces.
[Expansive palettes still exist in hell.])
Leads me to say that
There’s a place between belief and acceptance,
And, once your parents get the memo,
Tell them to meet us there in a peace
That passes all understanding like Christ,
Your mother’s and my favorite prophet.
Blake Wallin is a recent Wheaton College alumnus who plans on working and gettng his MFA within the next couple of years.
Cover Photo: Bulent Mourad (https://twitter.com/bulentm)