Today, today is all of time. Mahmoud Darwish
I trained my hand to do it without the eye.

In my palm held the flesh, felt the shrimp’s small sinews fall

to pieces in the sink, my fingers slick and the smell

of fish the smallest sound in this kitchen in Bushwick.

After a few fumbled tries, I gentle cut open the intestines, dozens of them

careful to keep the shit contained.
In between is a place, I said to Akram’s surprise,

and the words gave flesh to a familiar feeling.

In the silent moments of our night, he said it again and again

to ensure that the waning hours of night had not melted

away the buttered truth of an untrue thing. I have always been

only in-between. A small medium between countries and ways of saying

showerhead, deposit, three pounds of porgy, lightbulb.
I wonder what rawness has affected in how we see death,

a stage before consumption before the cooking of

a flesh to our body’s liking. He slid his finger into the

underbelly of the fish the butcher had cleaned with

wide leathered hands, a pinked knife clipping off the

scales in rows, iridescent waste plop upon cellophane. We

stuffed the belly of each fish with chopped aromatics,

garlic, jalepeño, cilantro, lemon, like his mother would be doing

in her kitchen in Gaza upon returning from the fish market,

selecting from what lay on the pillows of ice, keeping

watch for the fresh ones without blood in their unflinching eye.
We smoked cigarettes in Akram’s kitchen. His roommate’s

live-in girlfriend of two weeks watched us dance to

mahragan songs on YouTube, smoked with us while she did

the dishes and outside it rained. Multiple things are always

happening at once. We were new to each other, met a night on Second Ave and

settled into a stranger’s conversation for three days for fear of being

again lost to the mouth of this voracious city. I have not seen him since.
Then I had become a collector of my own memories, made

home in a plastic box of toiletries and a small shrine to my friends.

In between belongings, I become a museum of myself.

Akram said he left everything behind and did not turn back

to remember because the past is far away and there are

some impossible returns that float around the city like ghosts

haunting where they never were able to leave. Some

places are not memories or metaphors. They cannot be

captured in the net of thought or language or a thing you put in a box

or tuck into your flesh. Some places become metaphors

the further away we get.
I hunger for a memory flayed and ageing and it begins to stink,

looks up at me with a tiny blood in its unflinching eye, threatens

to become more raw and rotten by the second, indifferent to whether

I cook it delicious in time.