There is a man in a barber’s chair in Mosul,
a professor of civil engineering at the local university,
and he commends Nancy Ajram, who sings “Akhasmak Ah,”
and he says—She also knows how to play the oud,
though the barber doesn’t hear any of it, the professor, the television,
he runs his fingers through silk black hair,
snips, snips, snips,
his mind back in the year 1982, the parachute’s
canopy snapping open above him,
the crisp sound of it harnessing the wind, and the earth,
how he never wanted to look down at it again;

and there are five children in an inflatable pool, too many
for such a small body of water, but there’s always room
for one more, as they say, and their mother,
just returned from the Shorja market, counts them,
not consciously, but with her eyes touching the slicked-backed hair
of each, ever so briefly, before touching the next;

and in the secondhand shops of Basra, the tailor
folds the cuff tight, the needle’s eye
held in his lips, marking chalk tucked behind his ear
as the young man about to be married
stares at the people in the street, how they hurry
he thinks, but to where—