Before Adam

Tear open any man and you’ll find a dirt road
leading toward a mountain.

The trees there, soft with weight
singing the one song they know, between them,

guarding the mountain.
guarding the man.

What wasn’t between their branches
made all the difference.

It made you think twice about what claim you had
on the trees.

Did you know that it has taken me, approximately, one thousand poems
blind with color, violence, and mystery
to tell my brother
that I love him.

There is no mystery to that.
There shouldn’t be.

I’ll say it plainly:
The brother I have is here because I love him.

I had a sister, who is dead by the time you reach this part.
She’s been dead for a while.
I carry her in me, like a pregnancy,
only I never deliver the bloody mess that would save me.

Sometimes, there is a simple figure, crazed with love, dirty with grief,
carrying the remnants of an Old God in his womb.

It’s Un-Abrahamic—sometimes, it’s nothing at all.
Certainly nothing redemptive
because no crime was committed.
The dead don’t sin,
no matter how badly you ask them to.

Look, now—
the man struggles toward the mountain
not realizing he is struggling toward himself.

The whole while, his stomach distends.

When he bursts open, he crawls from the wound in his own gut
covered in fluid, asking for directions to his mother’s house.

Someone tells him, and he heads there in an abandoned car
the past and the future both fading up the mountain road.

He leaves, and the mountain cradles his name
softly.

Artwork Courtesy of our featured Artist Hassan Zahreddine