{"id":2782,"date":"2016-04-11T16:29:14","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T16:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fullofcrow.com\/poetry\/?page_id=2782"},"modified":"2016-04-11T16:29:14","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T16:29:14","slug":"joanna-grant-april-2016","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.fullofcrow.com\/poetry\/archives\/joanna-grant-april-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Joanna Grant, April 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Night Flight from Dubai<\/strong><\/p>\n

1.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are so many. I\u2019ve done the rounds, you see,<\/span><\/p>\n

like so many other Americans with too much nothing<\/span><\/p>\n

piled up at home, flying off to the ends of our worlds,<\/span><\/p>\n

trying to buy our ways back to better. Do six months,<\/span><\/p>\n

make enough for two years. Place your bets\u2014will your wife<\/span><\/p>\n

or husband love or leave you. Will the kids whose dreams<\/span><\/p>\n

you\u2019re buying ever forgive you for going away to do it.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We all go through Dubai, DXB. Past the flashy chrome and neon,<\/span><\/p>\n

the spurting fountains and the ersatz gold souk and the Costa Coffees<\/span><\/p>\n

one every six feet or so it seems to the business end. The terminal<\/span><\/p>\n

where the workers go, and the Kuwaiti citizens who hire them, and us.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a soldier, out of uniform, but you can always tell, going back <\/span><\/p>\n

to another war that nobody cares about anymore. Builders and programmers,<\/span><\/p>\n

the guys who fix the drones, the superstars of our shaggy little world.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the Kuwaitis headed home in their long robes, white on the men,<\/span><\/p>\n

black on the women, jet black as the kohl lining their eyes. Just like last time<\/span><\/p>\n

and the time before that and the time before that. But this time.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2.<\/span><\/p>\n

This time, this flight, something new. Such a large group of\u2014Bangladeshi?\u2014men.<\/span><\/p>\n

Men. I say that but they\u2019re all so small, so slim, most with smooth cheeks and <\/span><\/p>\n

long lashes more like girls. They\u2019re loud, pumped up, chattering back and forth<\/span><\/p>\n

between themselves, fumbling with seat belts they\u2019ve obviously never seen <\/span><\/p>\n

or used before. They all wear plain white ball caps, the company name printed <\/span><\/p>\n

out there on the fronts in big block letters. Thick black Magic Marker.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I know what I\u2019m seeing, I\u2019ve seen it all before, but never quite so up close.<\/span><\/p>\n

They bring them here from all over, Jeremy our visa sponsor told us over coffee<\/span><\/p>\n

and his Marlboro Reds, waving a languid hand towards the window. We see a band<\/span><\/p>\n

of jumpsuited men, workers digging ditches, heads wrapped up against the smog and heat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Twin plumes of smoke from Jeremy\u2019s nostrils twist up to the clicking ceiling fan<\/span><\/p>\n

pushing around the dusty air. All over the Gulf, they get them in here from <\/span><\/p>\n

Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or India or the Philippines. Keep their passports. Make \u2018em work<\/span><\/p>\n

to pay back their \u201cfees\u201d or until they drop dead first. God help you if you\u2019re some<\/span><\/p>\n

pretty Pinoy girl they get in to be a nanny or somebody\u2019s domestic help. So corrupt.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyone fancy another cup?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re taxiing in, so late at night, the wear and stains of all our <\/span><\/p>\n

previous legs starting to show, all our eyes dark-ringed now<\/span><\/p>\n

in the harsh fluorescent lights. The boys are tiring now, and <\/span><\/p>\n

you can feel the ripple\u2014fear. What next. They\u2019re right to, even<\/span><\/p>\n

if they don\u2019t know it yet. And then suddenly\u2014one of the boys<\/span><\/p>\n

who\u2019d perhaps had too much wine for the very first time\u2014vomits<\/span><\/p>\n

all over the aisle and then starts to cry, sinking to his hands and knees,<\/span><\/p>\n

sobbing like a hysterical child. I can\u2019t bear to watch. But I can\u2019t look away.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, that poor thing,\u201d tears out of me before I know I\u2019ve spoken aloud. <\/span><\/p>\n

His friend ducks down to help and gets him on his feet. As we shuffle off<\/span><\/p>\n

I imagine what\u2019s to come for all these boys, all young enough to be my sons.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And a sinking comes down upon my soul, and all the weight<\/span><\/p>\n

of all the nothing I can do to help that boy who cried, him or any<\/span><\/p>\n

of the many others like him. All I can do is remember. To utter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell what I\u2019ve seen. And plead. With something someone anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let us be like this. Don\u2019t let them be like that. \u00a0Please not me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let it be this way. Don\u2019t let. Don\u2019t be.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ex Voto<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Daniel Albright<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Somewhere Between Kuwait and Iraq, 2015<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They\u2019re everywhere here. Little piles of stones.<\/span><\/p>\n

One on top the other, three or four or more, precarious.<\/span><\/p>\n

Teetering. But somehow weathering. Never mind <\/span><\/p>\n

the thunderstorms, hail the size of fists, angry torrents<\/span><\/p>\n

of these humid desert winters tearing strange new <\/span><\/p>\n

channels in this flat, sandy, rocky waste.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Such a strange beauty. Dust in the ether streaking everything<\/span><\/p>\n

strange. Pinkish, ochers, oranges. How it can throw a glamour<\/span><\/p>\n

on a tangle of barbed wire. An old bathtub. A blown-out tire<\/span><\/p>\n

slung over a warped traffic cone. And flying from every snag<\/span><\/p>\n

or spike a ragged, fading plastic bag. They say that, long ago,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They used to build a little cairn or stack of stones to mark<\/span><\/p>\n

where something happened\u2014an amazement, some local wonder,<\/span><\/p>\n

or the way to somewhere else, or perhaps a source of water.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since all the wars without end or beginning they tell us <\/span><\/p>\n

it could be land mines. A little pile of rocks a reminder.<\/span><\/p>\n

Be careful where you set your foot down here. \u00a0\u00a0Like most lessons<\/span><\/p>\n

one you tend to learn too late to do you any good.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You never really loved me. Or perhaps you did.<\/span><\/p>\n

I always meant to ask. Someday. I wonder <\/span><\/p>\n

if you ever would have answered. Making the turn<\/span><\/p>\n

toward Iron Horse where they fire the enormous guns<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember your last letter. From the other side of the world<\/span><\/p>\n

you wrote. Told me that my life had more explosions in it<\/span><\/p>\n

than a well-ordered existence should. I can\u2019t say I disagree.<\/span><\/p>\n

You were always so much smarter than me. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I looked for you, in your birthday month. Like I always did.<\/span><\/p>\n

To see how long your hair had grown. Your face always so smooth.<\/span><\/p>\n

As if the years were loath to touch you. Until suddenly. <\/span><\/p>\n

They said it was your heart.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I used to send you all the things I\u2019d written. Even<\/span><\/p>\n

from out here in this desert of the broken places.<\/span><\/p>\n

You liked them. Mostly. So here\u2019s one last.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the Petrarch in me, the one you said you couldn\u2019t need.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I wish I could have given you something you wanted.<\/span><\/p>\n

But here, today, from these salty wastes where the world began<\/span><\/p>\n

and might just end\u2014just for today, in the face of truth and sense,<\/span><\/p>\n

every plastic scrap, every stone piled on stone, every tire on tire,<\/span><\/p>\n

every wild rusty twist of old metal and barbed wire\u2014nothing but<\/span><\/p>\n

your name, your name, your name flapping in the wind<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Road to Mandalay<\/span><\/p>\n

He enters the windowless room carrying, under his arm\u2014my heart,<\/span><\/p>\n

the tracings of its beats, all my other parts and functions <\/span><\/p>\n

each with their column of numbers, the ones that I need just so<\/span><\/p>\n

to keep working overseas. He spells his name for me, H-T-W-T,<\/span><\/p>\n

then pronounces it, slowly. Like a bird in a tree, he says, <\/span><\/p>\n

in your English you say it like tweet. That is how to say my name.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He traces my heartbeats with a fingertip, reassuring.<\/span><\/p>\n

Heart is healthy, he tells me, and I say thanks. He tries to <\/span><\/p>\n

say my name, but can\u2019t get his tongue around Grant.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He says he\u2019s from Burma when I ask about his name,<\/span><\/p>\n

that strange flock of consonants, and where it\u2019s from.<\/span><\/p>\n

Burma, not Myanmar. We both know what happened there,<\/span><\/p>\n

and why he must have left to come to this Atlanta suburb,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Like the Bosnian nurse who takes my blood pressure and pulse,<\/span><\/p>\n

the African woman whispering French into her phone or<\/span><\/p>\n

the little Korean man flipping through <\/span>Latina Parenting<\/span><\/i>,<\/span><\/p>\n

all of us putting in time getting papers in order, getting those stamps<\/span><\/p>\n

to go work in the unpronounceable places where your own name<\/span><\/p>\n

garbles into some cluster of squawks out of the mouth of some animal,<\/span><\/p>\n

almost impossible for the confused locals to sound out.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Well now Burma, I say. Now there\u2019s one place I\u2019ve never been.<\/span><\/p>\n

I hope to go someday. The road to Mandalay. He smiles, <\/span><\/p>\n

squeezing my hand. If I ever get there in this life <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It might still be the country he left. But never the one that never left him. <\/span><\/p>\n

The one on the old map of his heart, the memory he still calls the old name.<\/span><\/p>\n

That never lived and always will. The same one I take back overseas with me.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That the African woman recalls in her lilted French. That the Bosnian<\/span><\/p>\n

nurse dreams his way back to at night. That even the one woman <\/span><\/p>\n

behind the desk who was born here and never moved away thinks of<\/span><\/p>\n

when the quiet takes her right. The rooms of the old house they don\u2019t live in<\/span><\/p>\n

any more. Old wallpaper and creaking floors. Refugees. From so many wars.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Her work has appeared in many journals, including Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily, and The Southern Humanities Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Night Flight from Dubai 1. There are so many. I\u2019ve 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\u2014will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":934,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2782","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nJoanna Grant, April 2016 - Full Of Crow: Poetry (Archives)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fullofcrow.com\/poetry\/archives\/joanna-grant-april-2016\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Joanna Grant, April 2016 - Full Of Crow: Poetry (Archives)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Night Flight from Dubai 1. There are so many. 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