After I returned with the grown-up strides
from burying my mother,
leaving her to raise her hens in an ‘mysterious' place,
I had to protect the house from the neighbors' spying.
I got used to sitting on the doorstep
waiting for the heroine of the radio soap opera
who was always persecuted.
And on the day my friend got a visa
to test her body on another continent—
though she did not as usual forget
her cigarettes on my table—
I became certain that smoking is a necessity.
I began to have a private drawer
and a secret man
who used to be her old lover.

Also,
when the doctors fail to find a kidney
that Osama's body will not reject—
Osama
whose kidneys frayed
because he repressed his bitterness to appear elegant—
maybe I'll start using his firmly raised thumb to assert my presence
in conversation…

It seems I inherit the dead.
One day
after the death of all those I love,
I will sit alone in a café
without any sense of loss,
because my body is a huge basket
where all those who leave
drop things
that bear their traces.