Much as I wish to write only poems
in which tall trees stand
for the lungs of the world and the moon
rises like a sigh in their branches,
I still sometimes dream
of being a serial killer. Tonight
I raped a faceless young woman
in a corrugated sewage tunnel,
disembowelled her and smeared
fistfuls of viscera and shit
over the tender breasts
of my trembling
accomplice, an act I filmed
and stored on a micro-SD card
soon discovered
by the IT guy sent to fix my work
computer, a silent man I hunted in the dark
playing fields of a secret NATO base,
awakening at four a.m.
just before the slaughter. To heal
the disappointment,
I watched YouTube videos
of Arab poets honouring
the bougainvillea, refusing,
in voices like mountains
of dark sugar,
to let their sons become soldiers.
Outside, the moon
coldly sings another body’s song
and the bare elms
continue, unperturbed,
their long slow exhalation
into spring.
Naomi Foyle
Naomi Foyle is a British-Canadian poet, science fiction novelist and essayist. Her many publications include the eco-SF quartetThe Gaia Chroniclesand three poetry collections includingAdamantine(Red Hen Press, 2019). The co-founder of British Writers in Support of Palestine, she visited Lebanon in 2016 as a guest of the Muslim charity Interpal, an experience she first wrote about in the essay ‘Palestine and (Human) Nature,’ published in the Nature issue ofCritical Muslim.
