Exiles of Eden Read online

  Exiles of Eden

  Exiles of Eden

  Ladan Osman

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

  Minneapolis

  2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Ladan Osman

  Cover art © Ladan Osman

  Cover design by Nica Carrillo

  Book design by Rachel Holscher

  Author photograph © Joe Penney

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Osman, Ladan, author.

  Title: Exiles of Eden / Ladan Osman.

  Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018040459 (print) | LCCN 2018041999 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895538 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895446 (trade pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PS3615.S53 (ebook) | LCC PS3615.S53 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040459

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  For Brigit Pegeen Kelly

  1951–2016

  the dead can mother nothing … nothing

  but our sight

  —“Dead Doe: I”

  Contents

  I

  Half-Life

  You Return with the Water: Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004

  Sympathy for Satan

  Inventory: Shrinkage

  [Do You Miss Waking Up Next to Someone?]

  Practice with Yearning Theorem: Tangents

  The sea fell on my house

  Sympathy for Eve

  II

  Catastrophic Breakdown

  [Rebound Rapt, 2016]

  Devotional with Misheard Lyrics

  All Bite the Bitten Dog

  After the Photograph of Emmett Till’s Open Casket, 1955

  In Which Christopher Robin Has an Incident

  [Double Consciousness I–III, 2017]

  Autocorrect

  NSFW

  The Bee’s Gospel

  III

  “Think of Me as Your Mother”

  Boat Journey

  Practice with Yearning Theorem: Loci

  Introduction through Parables: Marwa

  Landscape Genocide

  Parable for Refugees

  [Untitled, 2017]

  Refusing Eurydice

  Notes

  to have a home is not a favour

  —“Anguish Longer Than Sorrow,”

  Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938–2018)

  Exiles of Eden

  I

  Half-Life

  Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story.

  —Solaris (1972)

  How can I fail outside and inside our home? I decay in our half-life.

  How can I fail with my body? How do I stay alone in this half-life?

  I started a ghazal about my hope’s stress fracture.

  I require rest from your unfocused eyes, my heat,

  which is becoming objective and observable.

  A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?

  The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

  Maybe I am the straw.

  Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:

  bray, flay, array.

  They relate to farms, decaying things,

  gray days, dismay.

  I am recently reckless about making a display

  of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.

  Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home

  by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”

  You know I’m fraying.

  You don’t try to braid me together.

  You don’t notice a tomcat wiggling his hind legs,

  ready to gather all my fabric,

  his paws over my accidental tassels.

  I’ve learned how to be appropriate sitting on my hands

  on the couch, not allowed to touch you.

  “Sex?” you say, like I asked you to make a carcass our shelter.

  I don’t recount my dreams to you

  because you’re insulted in most of them.

  Remember when I asked you to break into a building?

  “Let’s have an adventure, any.”

  I dreamed another man was taking me into a locked school.

  “Let’s go,” he said. No face, his hand straight behind him.

  He was wearing a black peacoat.

  Many men wear black wool coats. You have one.

  Hell, I have one. I may have been leading myself.

  “How long will you live this half-life?”

  my mother asks during a phone call when, so absent

  of any particular emotion, I couldn’t catch my breath.

  She thought I was upset, losing my temper in the street.

  It’s months later, and when we talk

  she says, “I was so happy today. Does that make sense?

  And here I am, sleeping on a bed older than your baby sister.”

  I’m not sure what bothers me but my voice gets low

  and I repeat myself.

  I raise and drop my palate without sound.

  “Good-night,” we say, each with something unaddressed,

  without allay.

  I try to remember half-lives, learned in science rooms,

  air dense with iron, vinegar. The process of dating old bones,

  old stones. Unstable nuclei, decay by two or more processes.

  Exponential death, exponential halving of a life.

  My mother has given me something to pursue and solve.

  I study the internet:

  “The biological half-life of water in a human being is about

  7 to 14 days, though this can be altered by his/her behavior.”

  This makes me want to fall asleep in the bathtub.

  In this house, it’s how we escape each other,

  where we find another warm body, moisture,

  work a sweat on our brows.

  I search doubling time, a related term,

  because I hate feeling fractioned.

  Kitchens, bowls of water steaming under dough:

  How long will it take to grow to twice its size?

  Depends on rack placement, heat of the water,

  type of bread, whether the house is humid.

  This house is only humid in the bathroom,

  after a long soak with the door closed. Or else,

  in summer. But it’s winter and a long time

  before our flesh can rise and get sticky

  in hands, on counters, in a proper resting place.

  You Return with the Water: Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004

  I)

  What was the apparatus that made your body stay in sleep?

  It must have been an adaptation from life as a prey animal

  standing in the turret. Your body was rigid

  flogging against the sheets.

  Your head often under the pillow,

  arms squared in a military press.

  But what was the weight you were holding?

  We played the Sleepytime Ocean CD every night,

  lullaby for a man whose night exhalations were sweet as apples.

  Horses are able to sleep standing. br />
  They doze and enter light sleep.

  You were most vulnerable in bed;

  your right eye open, responding to questions,

  my cries against night-terror figures.

  You talked me out of sleep,

  asked about my dreams:

  “Oh, you were tired of the Fruit People?

  Why? They fed us lemons?

  Tell me about the horse, about how I was a horse.”

  II)

  We said good-bye before you left for Camp Atterbury,

  your parents and I, in my best dress shirt,

  after chicken finger dinners that later made us sick.

  You begged me to finally fart for you.

  We joked about sending me to Iraq,

  to sit on the chests of enemies, gas their faces.

  Enemies who dressed like my parents.

  A few weeks later, after a small ice storm,

  your phone call: they gave you Christmas.

  I was on my empty campus, too cold to go home,

  every day wearing my Rudolph the Reindeer robe.

  I made you a cake. I put on lacy black underwear.

  While I waited, rawing the base of my tailbone

  with that cheap lace, 1000 miles of land slipped.

  Waited 100 seconds. Slipped again.

  A thousand dead. Tens of thousands dead. Maybe hundreds of.

  People on a Thai beach said they saw large fish, sharks

  on the sand. They took pictures of the water receding,

  ran with bile rising faster than water,

  feet slower than an ocean floor with its hackles up.

  I turned it off. You missed the news those days,

  and for over a year afterward.

  Instead we made brittle snowballs,

  slid on osteoporotic ice.

  You in the green Battle Dress Uniform

  they issued before your Desert Camouflage.

  How do you train for Iraq in the Indiana woods,

  in winter, without the random work of war?

  I could simulate it by showing you the tsunami,

  its multiple strikes,

  its hours-long inundations.

  We fell asleep, cake uneaten. You woke terrified,

  telling me to get out, get out, the skunks in the forest

  were coming to get me. I hunted for them

  in your clothes, the leaves of your pants.

  “Tell me about the forest,

  about how I was a forest.”

  Sympathy for Satan

  He’s just a man, my mother says

  now that men have come

  verb-shifting, evading contexts,

  covering themselves with ash

  then calling themselves dark,

  calling themselves devils.

  They begin flowery discourses.

  They sometimes enter a garden disguised as ferns.

  They petition for possibilities beyond ease.

  Satan asked questions he couldn’t answer.

  He unmoored himself, maybe forever,

  because he dealt in knowledge, not rhetoric.

  His punishment: silence,

  confinement to the subjunctive.

  “If only, if only,” he says.

  If only, if only leads to the devil.

  A miniature man, vibrating in spit on my molars,

  destroying silicone sealants in my ash-palette sleep.

  He’s a man, not capable of encouraging

  honey palettes, not a sun that favors a window.

  Not a mirror that bounces my own light onto my crown.

  Just a man.

  [In court, you submit to other humans.]

  WHEREFORE, the petitioner prays:

  I asked to dissolve the bonds now existing.

  A miniature woman had worried the marrow of my heart-bone:

  How long will you live a half-life,

  half-life?

  I believe in God’s bounty.

  He calls Himself the Grateful.

  It lengthens the mind, to jump over narcissism

  and find simple recognition: your Self in a great mirror

  of your own construction.

  I believe in God’s bounty,

  trust I’ll ask Satan how it feels to court beings

  who chose distance from ease,

  with no rhetorical intent.

  He must talk through his teeth.

  His spit must vibrate between his teeth.

  How it feels to deal entirely in regret,

  his inheritance the first subjunctive construction:

  If only.

  What does it mean to pray for paradise now?

  We don’t wonder at our distance from greenness.

  We could stand knee-deep in ferns and sob for another forest.

  Is it possible God isn’t angry?

  Bewildered.

  Certainly God could choose to go astray from Himself

  and we’d ask: What is Your relationship to darkness? To light?

  Inventory: Shrinkage

  I lost my grip. / I balanced it on a piece of paper.

  —Little Dragon

  I can’t turn my head  right,

  salute the angel recording good deeds: Hey.

  You must be idle lately.

  “I’m missing my mind,” I say.

  My real laugh. My scream.

  A gold compass gifted at birth.

  A gold earring in the shape of an egg.

  I lost my mother’s pineapple necklace.

  She lost her syrup scent.

  My  mouth.

  Every few months, I feel

  it retreat. At the corners.

  I can’t tell the difference between

  incense dust,

  a rabbit pellet,

  Is it food or waste?

  and the moon.

  It’s all ash.

  I lost my sense of direction.

  I lost my sense of the sun.

  I didn’t know which way to pray

  until an overweight housefly showed me.

  I forgot which burner I kept the kettle on.

  My husband kept moving it,

  so I lost my marriage, too.

  Over thirty pounds,

  and my linen slacks but not the jacket;

  my cleavage;

  I jiggled to my insteps when I chased buses.

  my sense of time;

  my ability to run after things;

  a desire to set things on fire.

  I stole whistle cookies,

  root beer.  Not men.

  I lost my interest in stealing away.

  I mean: being  stolen away.

  Once I climbed a pool-house wall

  to see water from above.

  I tore my fingers. They peel every few years.

  My mother says I made my fingers black er.

  At their joints. I started to climb a man

  but I think he was climbing, too.

  Like pools, I wonder if water

  looks better in blue eyes.

  I made my heart an indoor inflatable,

  and drop-kicked men who lingered.

  We bounced  all over the place.

  I jumped  off the top of my heart

  onto them. Only I had access

  to the second floor.

  I’m losing my understanding

  of metaphors. I blink

  at allegory:  Of course Cain

      had to one-up his brother.

      We all want our harvests accepted.

      Sometimes we cut down men.

  My ability to cry  so the floor

  springs pools    with no source. I blink.

  Doorframes drip.  I blink.

  The fridge leaks  three times,

  stops when my landlord observes.

  It must be quantum physics.

  Is my home supposed to be my  self?

  If so, they
’re turning off the water tomorrow.

  When I look at the gristle on my heart,

  I fraction. In a trinity-fold bathroom mirror,

  especially at night, my recursive selves

  are tinged green.

  I’d like to call myself a  of ferns

  but I’ve had difficulty with vocabulary

  for living things,  thriving.

  Do You Miss Waking Up Next to Someone?

  Practice with Yearning Theorem: Tangents

  I make room on the doormat

  though no one is coming.

  It’s a hot night. I’ll eat cool soup,

  maybe out of the can. No,

  garnish it: Are carrot shavings

  good in butternut squash soup?

  I take a photo, crop the bowl’s chipped rim.

  Maybe I’ll send it to my siblings

  to show them I’m living well.

  I’m eating soup and salad

  I couldn’t buy at a restaurant most days.

  I shower and sleep free from molesters.

  I’ve paid my bills this month,

  and washed my dishes

  with my own two hands.

  But am I grateful? Last night,

  I tried to kill a moth. Two moths

  sprang out of it, and split.

  I didn’t know moths made formations.

  The night before that, I killed a moth,

  got a paper towel to clean the wall,

  and found another moth next to it.

  I killed it, too. Why should I go on

  killing moths? What have they done?

  On the way home tonight,

  I saw two pots of flowers

  with fronds cascading from them.

  Then a dog with his head,

  forepaws outside the fence.

  He needed a pat

  but I recalled his barking,

  his paws slapping the fence.

  I wondered if this was the same dog.

  On some hot nights, I remember

  a poem about a restless woman

  in a laundromat, her wetness.

  At eighteen this was amusing.

  Later, I read that rare plants

  prime in laundromats

  and understood her.

  It’s a hot night. End of summer.

  A scratch on my nose burns

  but I don’t wash off my makeup

  in case I go out.

  Maybe I’ll “get to go out,”

  like a kid waiting at the back door,

  her mother at the sink.

  I kill yet another moth,