![Dance my Tsifteteli](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/dance-470x140.jpg)
Boubouka dancing
in the middle of the small floor
her costume revealing bare legs
belly, shoulders and arms
![The Ideal City](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/idealcity-470x140.jpg)
… its studied perspective and funneled point of view
having sucked me in
to roam a plaza almost entirely empty
![Long Before The End of The World](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/beforetheend-470x140.jpg)
It’s under my skin, spread out like a thin layer
of drying pus between the transverse ligaments of my forearms
the ropey muscles that pit in the backs of my knees
![The Dust Eater](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dusteater-470x140.jpg)
She squats by the sluggish cerise tinged river
Under a heavily laden tree with debauched fruit
![Mother Drinks Wine on Thanksgiving](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/motherdrinkswine-470x140.jpg)
Mother, out of the nursing home for Thanksgiving,
skeletally osteo-arthritic at ninety-two, smacks
her thin lips at the first taste of white wine like
Priscilla, Queen of the Wine Harvest;
![The Streets of Paris](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/paris-street-470x140.jpg)
Bare-breasted nymphs with six arms or more:
A model, a pageant, a dancer and a whore,
Paraded before a kipa, a hijaab and a turban;
![Everything Happens While I Sleep](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/whileisleep-470x140.jpg)
The sand is wet
from the forgotten rain
that poured over the streets
and shop corners last night.
![One of Us](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/oneofus-470x140.jpg)
Somewhere in a town where time has died
and where the river does not speak,
I see you staring at the fishermen
![Insignia](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ranjani-470x140.jpg)
a leaf has come to the door
so bend the ear to whence we
reinvented ourselves through
curlicues of air,
![From the Beginning](https://www.tbr-olderissues.com/wp-content/themes/oxygen/images/archive-thumbnail-placeholder.gif)
Did you exist in God’s mind from the beginning?
Persisting as light that shined from the beginning?