When You Meet the Roma at the River

Philip Metres

1970 –

your face translates
for river and ever
translates your fate

sign her your sins
and ever forgiver
sings she your sins

pay her your pay
for debtors endeavor
to spit in the river

your sins will be
and severed forever
spat into river

unlike the river
a mirror reflecting
its framing forever

your sins will be
just spit in the river
you’ll probably live

You Have Come Upon People Who Are like Family and This Open Space

know cannot I
end will this how
both are we though

air different in breathing
flesh different of planets
stop won’t I

hand my holding
you toward
اهال وسهال

people upon come have you
family like are who
space open this

space this open
you welcome I that
away turn to

stay to wish you unless
shoes your remove and rest
speak your into lean we

slake to drink tender
eat to fullness and
end the are you

beginning my of
of beginning the
end my

Philip Metres

2024

At the Arab American Wedding

great-uncles in tuxes played gin,
drank scotch, counted

cash by the pool
like extras from The Godfather.

Inside, aunts had long given up
the old country—

or else wrapped it,
carefully, inside grape leaves.

Philip Metres

2024

The Arab Crosses into Los Estados Unidos

Once I bathed in new phrases,
spoke with the starthroat.

Silked in sentences, curled
inside the parentheses

of dream. Once my father bent
a dime between his index

and his thumb, snapped a house
from air, swallowed gold fire

captured in singing glass. Glass
sang from his circling touch.

But when they came for him,
he danced to their orchestra

of bullets.

We did not wait
to tuck him safely

into earth, raise his name
in stone.

Philip Metres

2024

Poems

When You Meet the Roma at the River

More by this poet

You Have Come Upon People Who Are like Family and This Open Space

At the Arab American Wedding

The Arab Crosses into Los Estados Unidos

Poems

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When You Meet the Roma at the River

More by this poet

You Have Come Upon People Who Are like Family and This Open Space

At the Arab American Wedding

The Arab Crosses into Los Estados Unidos

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