Two Poems by Abdul-Jaleel Abdalla

Malaria Suicide
 
On a gas stove pears are brewing in chai tea.
The rhapsody of Qatari dates split open like mandalas
Melt the sticks of oud. You watch the Moroccan
Spiced eyes of sunset trail off behind pentagram mountains;
Skies red from the meditation of fasting. Your stomach
Burnt out with fragrances of a Syrian moon, which rises
Above dusk aromas. Your insides an empty ashtray of galaxies.
With practice, gutting out food and nicotine for a month
Becomes an instrumental study of your own criminal
Psychology: a gonzo lifestyle of arithmetic cathedrals
Of pain. 
 
Soon it will be time to pull the balls of malaria off the trees,
Go back inside and set them down on the table,
Take a scalping blade and curve back the rind,
Watch it curl over your wrist, then throw them in
With the pears, listening to the crows moan.
Or maybe you’ll look on as a cloud of mosquitos
Head towards a mass suicide beyond the dreaming
Of a gothic Ramadan.
 
 


Shooting birds in a field, 1989

while shooting birds his eyes were dim and narrow.
my father’s beard sopped with cold morning mist,
meditating the owls hiding sweet seeds of sapphire
behind their beaks. their oracles begin shouting
in the gun’s blossom of bullets. the sun
pushes through deep dreaming’s ruin.
only kookaburras gargling tree sap
fantasies the recklessness of dreams.
the ember of their feathers glowing in the dark leaves.
as we turn to leave them
our backs crumble like mountains.


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Bio: Abdul-Jaleel Abdalla is a poet and artist from Brisbane, Australia.

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