unsolicited cocktails arrive by deliberate airmail

puffing new mushrooms in the landscape

little ones dead before they are dead

between the rock and the

            alluvial plain

fingers like tapas in random perch

            on granule and boulder

hair and face arched upward

mouths open for silence.

blood dotted, like painter’s palette and

            sausage guts

offered to ant farms housed on desert pads

how many more will fall before

I die in dust

older than before there was an Arab