"A Summer’s Tale with Fire Birds" by Deema K. Shehabi

Deema K. Shehabi  is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (PM Press), for which she received the Northern California Book Award's NCBR Recognition Award. She is also co-author of Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and the winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018.Deema’s work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including Literary Imagination, the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Poetry London, and Crab Orchard, to name a few. Her work has been translated into French, Farsi, and Arabic, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart prize several times. ​

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A Summer’s Tale with Fire Birds                                                                  
 
 
Ghosts of hybrid hummingbirds, iridescent green, lurch forward in the charred
trees along the highway. We drive to the lake basin as thousands of acres burn:
redwood, white fir, ponderosa pine, giant sequoias, the rhythm of their fall apparent
only to firefighters & prison inmates making two dollars a day. No sign
of the large pebbles, mossy and slippery at the lake’s entrance.
We barely notice the water’s altered eyelids, shallow at the sky’s mouth.
This time, our entry into the cool current at high altitude leaves you with no air,
and our boys gawk at the spectacle of a breathless father. Bruised with sea eyes,
they know nothing of checkpoints nor functionaries with ruby-lined fingers at passport control
windows. They have a home beneath a live oak and Siberian elm, its windows are married to
arbutus marina, its fences are lined with honeysuckle vines. Our sadness,
a penultimate inertia, is more expectant than theirs. In the morning, you crave
a lupine grief, an easel kiss on the nose. In your dream, there are two of me,
one through the keyhole and one on your side of the door. Does she wear a nightgown
with anemones, too? I ask. We gleam open like the lake, our rib cages still intact.