Night Flight from Dubai
1.
There are so many. I’ve done the rounds, you see,
like so many other Americans with too much nothing
piled up at home, flying off to the ends of our worlds,
trying to buy our ways back to better. Do six months,
make enough for two years. Place your bets—will your wife
or husband love or leave you. Will the kids whose dreams
you’re buying ever forgive you for going away to do it.
We all go through Dubai, DXB. Past the flashy chrome and neon,
the spurting fountains and the ersatz gold souk and the Costa Coffees
one every six feet or so it seems to the business end. The terminal
where the workers go, and the Kuwaiti citizens who hire them, and us.
Here’s a soldier, out of uniform, but you can always tell, going back
to another war that nobody cares about anymore. Builders and programmers,
the guys who fix the drones, the superstars of our shaggy little world.
And the Kuwaitis headed home in their long robes, white on the men,
black on the women, jet black as the kohl lining their eyes. Just like last time
and the time before that and the time before that. But this time.
2.
This time, this flight, something new. Such a large group of—Bangladeshi?—men.
Men. I say that but they’re all so small, so slim, most with smooth cheeks and
long lashes more like girls. They’re loud, pumped up, chattering back and forth
between themselves, fumbling with seat belts they’ve obviously never seen
or used before. They all wear plain white ball caps, the company name printed
out there on the fronts in big block letters. Thick black Magic Marker.
I know what I’m seeing, I’ve seen it all before, but never quite so up close.
They bring them here from all over, Jeremy our visa sponsor told us over coffee
and his Marlboro Reds, waving a languid hand towards the window. We see a band
of jumpsuited men, workers digging ditches, heads wrapped up against the smog and heat.
Twin plumes of smoke from Jeremy’s nostrils twist up to the clicking ceiling fan
pushing around the dusty air. All over the Gulf, they get them in here from
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or India or the Philippines. Keep their passports. Make ‘em work
to pay back their “fees” or until they drop dead first. God help you if you’re some
pretty Pinoy girl they get in to be a nanny or somebody’s domestic help. So corrupt.
Anyone fancy another cup?
3.
We’re taxiing in, so late at night, the wear and stains of all our
previous legs starting to show, all our eyes dark-ringed now
in the harsh fluorescent lights. The boys are tiring now, and
you can feel the ripple—fear. What next. They’re right to, even
if they don’t know it yet. And then suddenly—one of the boys
who’d perhaps had too much wine for the very first time—vomits
all over the aisle and then starts to cry, sinking to his hands and knees,
sobbing like a hysterical child. I can’t bear to watch. But I can’t look away.
“Oh, that poor thing,” tears out of me before I know I’ve spoken aloud.
His friend ducks down to help and gets him on his feet. As we shuffle off
I imagine what’s to come for all these boys, all young enough to be my sons.
And a sinking comes down upon my soul, and all the weight
of all the nothing I can do to help that boy who cried, him or any
of the many others like him. All I can do is remember. To utter.
Tell what I’ve seen. And plead. With something someone anything.
Don’t let us be like this. Don’t let them be like that. Please not me.
Don’t let it be this way. Don’t let. Don’t be.
Ex Voto
For Daniel Albright
Somewhere Between Kuwait and Iraq, 2015
They’re everywhere here. Little piles of stones.
One on top the other, three or four or more, precarious.
Teetering. But somehow weathering. Never mind
the thunderstorms, hail the size of fists, angry torrents
of these humid desert winters tearing strange new
channels in this flat, sandy, rocky waste.
Such a strange beauty. Dust in the ether streaking everything
strange. Pinkish, ochers, oranges. How it can throw a glamour
on a tangle of barbed wire. An old bathtub. A blown-out tire
slung over a warped traffic cone. And flying from every snag
or spike a ragged, fading plastic bag. They say that, long ago,
They used to build a little cairn or stack of stones to mark
where something happened—an amazement, some local wonder,
or the way to somewhere else, or perhaps a source of water.
Since all the wars without end or beginning they tell us
it could be land mines. A little pile of rocks a reminder.
Be careful where you set your foot down here. Like most lessons
one you tend to learn too late to do you any good.
You never really loved me. Or perhaps you did.
I always meant to ask. Someday. I wonder
if you ever would have answered. Making the turn
toward Iron Horse where they fire the enormous guns
I remember your last letter. From the other side of the world
you wrote. Told me that my life had more explosions in it
than a well-ordered existence should. I can’t say I disagree.
You were always so much smarter than me.
I looked for you, in your birthday month. Like I always did.
To see how long your hair had grown. Your face always so smooth.
As if the years were loath to touch you. Until suddenly.
They said it was your heart.
I used to send you all the things I’d written. Even
from out here in this desert of the broken places.
You liked them. Mostly. So here’s one last.
From the Petrarch in me, the one you said you couldn’t need.
I wish I could have given you something you wanted.
But here, today, from these salty wastes where the world began
and might just end—just for today, in the face of truth and sense,
every plastic scrap, every stone piled on stone, every tire on tire,
every wild rusty twist of old metal and barbed wire—nothing but
your name, your name, your name flapping in the wind
The Road to Mandalay
He enters the windowless room carrying, under his arm—my heart,
the tracings of its beats, all my other parts and functions
each with their column of numbers, the ones that I need just so
to keep working overseas. He spells his name for me, H-T-W-T,
then pronounces it, slowly. Like a bird in a tree, he says,
in your English you say it like tweet. That is how to say my name.
He traces my heartbeats with a fingertip, reassuring.
Heart is healthy, he tells me, and I say thanks. He tries to
say my name, but can’t get his tongue around Grant.
He says he’s from Burma when I ask about his name,
that strange flock of consonants, and where it’s from.
Burma, not Myanmar. We both know what happened there,
and why he must have left to come to this Atlanta suburb,
Like the Bosnian nurse who takes my blood pressure and pulse,
the African woman whispering French into her phone or
the little Korean man flipping through Latina Parenting,
all of us putting in time getting papers in order, getting those stamps
to go work in the unpronounceable places where your own name
garbles into some cluster of squawks out of the mouth of some animal,
almost impossible for the confused locals to sound out.
Well now Burma, I say. Now there’s one place I’ve never been.
I hope to go someday. The road to Mandalay. He smiles,
squeezing my hand. If I ever get there in this life
It might still be the country he left. But never the one that never left him.
The one on the old map of his heart, the memory he still calls the old name.
That never lived and always will. The same one I take back overseas with me.
That the African woman recalls in her lilted French. That the Bosnian
nurse dreams his way back to at night. That even the one woman
behind the desk who was born here and never moved away thinks of
when the quiet takes her right. The rooms of the old house they don’t live in
any more. Old wallpaper and creaking floors. Refugees. From so many wars.
Joanna Grant: “I work overseas, teaching writing and humanities courses to American soldiers, and these poems grow out of the cultural collisions I see every day as a member of what the BBC calls the sojourner class–people on the road, migrating, emigrating, struggling through war zones of all kinds trying to find a way to live in this world.”
Her work has appeared in many journals, including Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily, and The Southern Humanities Review.
