Our buildings are face-to-face in ’88–

towards Al-Raouché, ours is the five-storey

apartment block my grandfather built

with Latin American money,

coffeecake cement pocked with bullet holes

that birds nest in, my verandah a playpen

of flaking paint & pollution grit. I’m 3 and my game

is to peel coins of rust from the railing.

My knuckles are still puckered with baby fat. Rust

is the brightest smell I know

in a world where I’m new dough rising

in the midst of death piled on
death, a layer cake of death.

Her building is taller and less ravaged by the war,

a throne in a Parisian style I don’t understand

in toddlerhood, the awnings green as the shallows

of a mighty nearby sea we’ve never saluted

together. I never knew
who she was. She looked so old–maybe 110–

I wonder now, was she

50? 60? wrinkled by burning rubber

and TNT, her hair a magnificent wheat-yellow beehive.

I’d wave to her, there shaded, top-floor balcony,

on her throne beneath her birdcages of vivid

canaries, her pygmy palms in glossy pots–

we would watch each other chronicling everything

the street carried for those breathcatching

moments of a long war.
            I heard you died, tante,

            me too.

            We all died, but our pummelled buildings

            by some miracle,

            stood.