Back to OUTBREAK.
The Airborne Toxic Event
Aya Labanieh
I went for a walk to the bench
where our confessions of love
had first let their many hairs
hang down. Fog was caught like
blue wool and webbing
on the stiff naked trees
and I saw a sparrow bathing
in a black puddle before me
and I thought, did they ask you
to wash yourself too, little one
are you also
as small-feeling as me
and as afraid? A constellation of walks
are conducted within my
visual field; humans arrayed in
patterns that do not resemble
warrior belts
or flying horses
that look instead
like beetles
going round
in a bucket
where a child
had collected them.
I make my pilgrimage
to our bench, I recall when I said to you
that if I had another chance at life
I’d come back as moss
and I’d climb the lengths
of tree trunks with my green
belly, all the way up
look out from the proliferation
of my eyeless face after rain
and call all that man and god made
mine. I will be like the General, keeping watch
over the cherry-blossoms that do not belong
in the City, let alone in
the plague.
I will beckon you here from
your island, such that I may
grow on you, and divide you
into many selves, some of which
share my flesh. You, trapped between four walls
share with me
a poem your father in Italy wrote
about the pandemic. He had recently
gotten special permission to leave house arrest
to buy food
for his pet
bees. This is
the only image from Italy
that makes me smile, but
the poem was no good; overly
loving of the
world. I take it as a challenge.
I want to hurt this crisis, I want it
chomping at the bit that
cuts its gums, bleeding from its face
as I pull it back
like a lawnmower.
He should have said
that if we bastards
are to be wiped
off this great, balding Head
like so many beads
of sweat, then
let us be Fire
and let us burn the world.
He should have said:
I am not tender
and the landscape
without me is
superfluous.
II.
The bird we said looked
exquisitely emerald and
computer-generated
ended up being
just a starling.
A madman in 1890 went mad enough
to introduce sixty of those manic pixies
into Central Park, in hopes that America
would one day contain
all the fauna described
by Shakespeare.
The world without you looms
like a bad poem
with sickeningly perfect
rhymes. Shakespeare and
his starlings smell of plague; they reek
of some masculine isolation, some
artifice.
I predicted all of this, when I asked you
not to leave New York. Without you here
the birds self-consciously wash themselves
fearing the onset of a fresh misery, a man
inspired by disease again
to write them into exile from exile;
will the next canon launch them
along Oregon trails, or to New Zealand?
will they learn two-thousand Kanji characters
only to be uprooted again
when the coughing wakes them
when exotic, new boils appear
on the faces that look up?
All along those birds
eyeing us from the boughs last Spring—
had they been waiting
for a sign? Was nothing
actually in our
celebration?
I have a quiet tendency
to rewrite the past
to a sad tune.
If you hadn’t left.
If you had curled up
in my lap and died
like a snake before all this
started, if you had
poisoned the streetwater
and the drains now
choking lewdly
with pink petals
we would not be alive for this
and the starlings would have
no reason
to be afraid.
about the writer
Aya Labanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, NYC. Her research centers on postcolonialism, Middle Eastern literature, conspiracy theories, and the tensions between modernity, secularism, and religion. When she is not reading novels, lifting weights, or re-applying war-paint, she is probably organizing for a strike at her workplace, or fortifying her claims to the title of meme-lord.