I wash my father every day since language escaped him. He gazes about from the violated privacy of his bathtub, his eyes wandering in search of someone to accuse. I know the lack of words angers him; he likes the loudness of things—big American fireworks; a sobbing spouse. He doesn’t realize it was the same words that often betrayed him in the past, first by announcing him an orphan, then a husband, and a father, a migrant, a hard worker that rewarded him with nothing but a bad back and a house crumbling in the same way his body would from places he didn’t even know existed. When I was a kid, he used to tell me my body was all wrong. Born wrong. That as a soldier the first thing he noticed was that a body was this malleable thing, wrung at heart’s will. That’s why, he said, he wanted to name me after Nanna, despite my mother’s protests. Nanna, the moon god, firm as a rock. A token of being from the tribe of desert people, a walking talisman for bad luck. His voice the word of another god, a divine microphone booming with conviction and judgment, marked with years of dictating his words to an audience not too older in age than him as the only imam in the fifty-mile radius of Assur, where I was born. These days, I watch him swallow his words and drown his belief in his muteness. I comb his hair to the scalp, trim his nails, and soap his moonlike knees that have cratered over the years with each fall, his member hanging like a warning between us, a deflated balloon. I never told him this, but I always liked him—like him—better this way, quiet and on the other side of control. Those little mind games he used to play with me when I was a kid, like burying everything dear to me in our backyard—my wishbones, my wisdom teeth, the tufts of my hair. Having me recite King Solomon’s story backward from memory, at which I would fail every time and cry. I started working alongside him at his best friend’s boating company when I turned fourteen, ferrying tourists across the River Tigris in the same way Charon would stranger souls in the afterlife. One day, a young British couple who were spending their honeymoon in the city tipped us generously for what the wife called the goodness of my face. My father thanked her, his eyes on her jade bracelet, which proved defenseless against the pull of gravity when I latched my hands on it and tried to snatch it off of her with all the power I could muster. When I succeeded, I threw the bracelet into the black waters. The woman slapped me left and right, telling me I’m a disgusting thief, the taste of blood a caramel in my mouth. My father started apologizing profusely, at loss for words again, just in a different way—for my behavior, for what had gotten into me, for me, my wishbones, my moon, my goddess. Nanna, my moon god, firm as a rock.
Poetry - ISSUE #27