A GHOST (JINN) STORY TARIK DOBBS

Recipient of the Projector Poetry Prize

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1.

 

 

I spent every Sunday in Saturday School

Tales in Qu’ran, no hijabs worn, nail polish abound

a reform mosque, all-American Muslims

 

 

I make Wudu in the marble-half showers

A jinn enters as there is no entrance or exit

just perfect squares in rows of wall

 

 

His presence sweeps under my ledge

water splashing onto my feet

Its fire warms me (the dirt)

pulling me from concrete tundra/Michigan

 

 

No wonder Shaytan comes from it, too

 

 

 

 

2.

 

 

I feel my sinuses clear

 

 

Warm-air and farm lands, the jinn shows me what flat

rooftops and green feel like: not bud

or roses nor apple blossoms, but a field of olive

trees and my grandfather’s bones

 

 

The jinn stands before the stone

We grieve

Its disguise? Azrail, a goat, the one

they slaughtered for: my mother’s seventh birthday

we cry, goat and I (it must’ve been a sight to see)

Sky sets and the fire goes out

 

 

3.

 

 

By morning, I’ve summoned the jinn again,

from a lighter I found

outside the BP gas station

We tease and smile and the jinn tells

my history through google image searches:

an anthropologist in the fields of the Amazon rainforest

Claude Lévi-Strauss; zaddy

 

 

So, the jinn knows my wish:

to make out with a 30-something,

straight anthropologist from the 20th century

We slump down behind the icy ally of the BP and kiss

its lips, the morning star and mine, the red

crescent

 

 

Now, I’m seventeen

Embers leave the worst

smell in my burnt

neckbeard

 

 

4.

 

 

I was stashing gum/candy in my hoodie pocket, the corner

store was emptier than usual

it was Eid, after all

Ayb, yes, but after all, the attendant sold

my 12 year-old friends loosies,

besides, ethics are artificial, the jinn admits

It’s why we are dirt and fire and not 

right light or water

He pulls me through tile and concrete

to the core/my home

 

 

5.

 

 

I slide into the jittering 2002 Audi A6/

my father pulls up the passenger power lock to let me in

His mechanic has cut the car computer circuitry

Jinn-proof, eh?

 

 

My father, always 15 minutes late after school,

sometimes he didn’t come at all

He ate pepperoni pizza on weekends

while we drove,

its smell

 

 

I can only know microaggressions:

he added anchovies to the lard,

radiator just waiting to explode,

haram, to release the burning being

back into my home

 

 

6.

 

 

“I regret the day your lovely carcass caught my eye” — John Grant

 

 

The record spins and the jinn steps in

His fire reflects in my pupils

I speak brusquely:

Why have you come to me?

Am I immoral, unclean?

 

 

The jinn slides out of my dresser without one word

He stands 5’9, he has dark eyebrows like mine,

a dented nose

pipe-in-hand, and tortoise eyeglasses,

skin to stovetop, he briefly

holds my hand/lights his pipe

like candle light, but nothing more

 

 

 

 

7.

 

 

The jinn shows my home with no doors and no hallways

No bedrooms and no kitchens and no

call-to-prayer alarm clock, just a frame of wood

in crumbling brick

 

 

It shows me before and after and now

Here and there, yesterday and

tomorrow; and we see the other

jinn and the other me, and we

kiss one last time

before it’s gone

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