Siham Karami

Sometimes Solitude Will Do

Light-fingered ripples dazzle
through needles, reflect
this moment’s disappearing —

the whole day now winged
by shadows
as each stone changes hue.

Tear me, papery, in shreds
and let it fall,
this pulse between the minutes

converging. I wash you down
with coffee, dreaming farther
as little notes float skyward,

lost in the torn cloud reef
recaptured by a distant hand,
a hard turn of the earth.

Collecting

You, lost in an ocean full of hours,
spread your watches on a silver tray
and count their gleaming faces, their turning hands
that pass over your own like deja vu.

Or why else would the cars out in the yard,
one by one, more than we really need,
fill the loss of something never held?
Lost or kept, there’s nothing ever held.

Not the boxes of old coins, the stamps
glued to each other now, their albums dim
and rarely opened, collected by our sons
whose hopes you closed up tight,

collecting locks and keys. They never match,
not after years forgetting them.
Not even sorted shells in their shoeboxes
bring us back the radiance, the sandy conches

where children hear the ocean
carried in the palms of their small hands,
and I can smell the kelp, the iodine,
minerals collecting in my bones.

Siham Karami co-owns a technology recycling company in Florida. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Angle Poetry, Kin Poetry, Raintown Review, Mezzo Cammin, Lavender Review, Innisfree Journal, String Poet, and an upcoming anthology Irresistible Sonnets, among other places. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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