Barbican Young Poets 2019-20

The music thumps out of the bars. He talks to me about the boy
he likes. A third cousin lends me her ID. A new friend wonders
how she could hold her love between Beirut and Dubai, while we
stall, binging on corn nuts. A stranger explains astrophysics to me,
pearls sewed onto her jeans. Puppies scramble across the floor
where we listened to poems last week.

Ammonium nitrate is imminent inside the port we drive past.
A sea leaps, but never swallows. Today I open my phone to
show Gabriel a photo of my grandparents and instead I see
a mushroom cloud.

When I have children, and they’re old enough to learn about
the explosion from their friends, will they ask me where I was?
Will they ask me what I was doing? Will they raise the same
questions I asked my mom about the war, for her to answer –

I don’t remember. Played cards. Waited.

I don’t remember. Played cards. Waited.
Did she know, at the time, that she’d make it through,
all the way to dropping me off at the playground
where I’d ask my friend at the gate why they don’t
eat Rice Krispie squares or gelatin, and I’d go
home to ask mom, where is God?

Maybe I’ll find an answer somewhere in measuring the dimensions of broken
buildings and bloodied streets on my phone against the weight of 18 years in a city
that raised me.

I’ll answer – dreaming of them in a poem, wishing
they wouldn’t have to ask me those questions about a past.
Will they too get to build their own picture of this city?