Aria Aber Song of Jamaal Look, I say, & Jamaal offers me his eyes. Jamaal, I have seen the palm trees in you— even grass wishes it had the colour your eye has. Has this anything to do with you? Jamaal, I must confess, it could be about my father’s eyes— lids wide apart, mint green hospital sheets. What is real if it’s not the way I bend, tongue on your hipbone: here, feel it, it’s the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Their ghosts light up my father’s anteroom in Kabul, here, the geography: the neural narrative that lights up my brain–– Look, I say, & its two little Os unhinge, spinning loose like the box of marbles that night—O aviary with the parakeets. O thirty-year-old war in my home O beer puddle, O bombshell locks & hospital they have burnt down. O parakeet in my fist, throbbing slow: birdblood & plume, O. All night, I gulped your eyes against my face, trying to make them see what my ears won’t stop hearing: this is to define tinnitus as more than a ringing. What is my leg in yours if it is not an attempt at singing? We awake with yesterday’s scent still warm on our scalps & on our wrists: dead parakeets everywhere we’ve kissed.