my city reborn

My city reborn. Opaque colors of graffiti that plastered walls like portraits—imagined that the spray-painted murals on 18th Street represented someone's truth. Clouds connect the skyline to the pavement. Horizonless metropolis. My city reborn. Because of a love affair with another. The brilliant ancestral sky of our homeland, where you sang um kalthoum from my grandmother’s rooftop. I think of your face. Green eyed, eyelashes women die for—someone would have made you a commodity in any place but there. Hands covered in ancient henna designs nonchalantly passed on. Young girls paint tattoos from American magazines, imagine blond hair against their dark features. But while we rejected tradition we always understood that beauty in it's purest form was to embrace: ink on faces, poetic tongues, drumbeats created to emulate the musical movement of our hips. At times I swear I smell the coals of taboon burning. Eyes close only to open with a gentle distance of realization. Burning leaves. Maybe even garbage. Not hand rolled bread layered with zataar. I never understood your language, but rarely lost in translation. Life in your eyes when almonds turned from white to brown. You no longer loved your husband. Gentle hand raising your sisters child. My city reborn from the love affair with a city that was not my own. Where you laid my grandfather to rest when the land was bare.