Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Co-Winner, selected by the New England Poetry Club Board
Letter to Rania in Amman
Ashburn, Virginia
Today I took the kids by stroller past
the monochromatic buildings of brick
and vinyl-slick houses on cul-de-sacs,
each mirroring the last. How is it a year⎯
no, more⎯has passed? Sixty-odd weeks
dust-busting mac-n-cheese beneath
the highchair, watching Dinosaur
Train, Sesame Street. Fall’s almost gone.
The stroller crunches what’s left of
leaves, and the air’s that pale deep blue
not unlike the sky above Amman late
October when restaurants shut down
their balconies for the season. Sunday
I followed a woman through Target,
feigning interest in robes to hear her speak
Arabic. ahmar or aswad?—she didn’t
know. When did M’aani go? K. said
he took a UN post in Africa before
Talal first spoke last spring. I imagine you
walking through Abdoun as we used to
to the children’s barbershop, the one
with chairs that look like planes, Talal
climbing into a booster of blue. They say
things are easier in the States. In many ways
it’s true. We had the whole
bird trail across from Safeway
to ourselves this afternoon, its storm-
water pond just clear enough to spot
an army of pollywogs. Another week
splitting cells and they’ll push
to the surface to breathe. How I worried
I’d never conceive. insh’allah, you said,
what will be will be. Before long
we picnicked beneath that terebinth—
in mixed-up Arabic, I called the sun a “giant
apricot” and the old lady eating
falafel laughed until she spat! I wish
my mistakes were still like that.
Truth is I write a hundred letters
in my head I’ll never send. I like to think
one day our sons might meet and find
words to say, even at our expense⎯
some joke about their mothers
who once were friends. Before long
the pond will turn to ice. Did I tell you
we saw a fox on its bank
last December? It sniffed a minute
at the few geese that were left, then
turned to go. Near the winter-
berry bush, its pawmarks leaving
a trail of arrows in the snow.
The Ugly American
Petra, Jordan
The boys beat the jennet because they could,
out of boredom, because she was in heat,
they beat her with sticks and switches and clods
of dirt. Because revolution had stalled the usual
parade of buses and there were no tourists to ferry
up 800 rock-cut steps to the Monastery,
they pinned her against a cliff and beat her.
Only a woman, very pregnant, saw, who’d left
her husband snapping photos near Q’asr Al-Bint,
left him in search of shade, somewhere to rest.
And when the boys cheered and laughed
and thrust their hips and whipped the jennet,
baiting their donkeys to mount her,
the woman, too, picked up a stone, though
she was half a field away; she heard herself
curse, think every stupid soulless thing
she’d heard about the filth borne of this region.
And when a man—an uncle? cousin?—came
charging, freed the jennet as it brayed then loped,
when he berated the boys, driving them off, the woman
watched them saunter toward the village trail.
As they joked and kicked up sand, it was then she felt
deep within the son she had forgotten. Please
understand this isn’t metaphor: when
I dropped the rock, I had blood on my hand.
They Ask Me to Send
coffee mixed with cardamom, Hebron glass—
vases and carafes, wood inlaid with Mother of Pearl.
They ask for bath soaps, mud masks, Dead Sea
scrubs and salts, water siphoned from the Baptismal site.
My father’s friend wants a dishdasha to parade around in
at parties. I ship him a pendant to ward off the Evil Eye.
I box up the shark tank at Le Royal, the latest
news from the camps. My cousin wants a picture of me
on a camel, a hookah with apple tobacco. I bubble-
wrap a jar of pickled pomegranate seeds, ignore
his requests for Bedouin kohl; send instead a minaret,
dump trucks snuffing the call to prayer. I send the air
at Aaron’s Tomb, a vial of wind whipped across
its peak. This week (much like the last) my mother
demands a precise “timeline” detailing
our stateside return. Her neighbor wants proof
I’m not giving birth in a cave. I send them painted ostrich
eggs, billboards of the heir-apparent. My husband’s
aunt needs a recipe for konafa, a rug
whose threads surge sea-foam and grey. I mail her
a mizmaze of taxis unzipping King’s Highway, the desert
fish’s bristling scales. And when they ask what holds us
to this region—aren’t we growing tired or afraid?—
I’ll parcel the kingdom’s shade. I’ll round up the fire
balloons signaling Ramadan’s end as
effortlessly they drift across Citadel hill
where teams of men dragged stones to mount
the Temple of Hercules, the still-standing Palace Dome,
where tonight a low red moon is pulsing dead
gold, dead gold, dead gold.
Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale, and coeditor of The Poem’s Country. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, her awards include an NEA fellowship, University of Wisconsin’s Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship, Colgate University’s O’Connor Fellowship, and a Pushcart prize, among others. Shara was Randolph College’s inaugural Anne Spencer Poet. Assistant Poetry Editor for Acre Books, she lives in Dubai.