legend of mount sannine

BY RUTH AWAD

Zahle, Lebanon

He is the names of the missing or dead.
Smokeless fire, a bell with its tongue cut out,

bloodseed in the foothills,
the funnel of a thousand flies.

Habibi, he’ll say, you have a home

here in the barracks
here with me.

My love, you’ll meet jinn
more times than you know

but to the mountains
that whisper and shake,

to the man who places bullets in your hand,
you’re only blood. Blood that spills.

gulls

BY RUTH AWAD

Tripoli, Lebanon

Smoke clots.
Fire rushes
back to the earth,

back to minutes before,
back to a man on his balcony
and the missile’s
pointing finger
and the body blistered.

Gulls
drag themselves
like a dagger
on the waterline.

Men can run—
what else?
What else
will save them from
the world they’ve burned?

Ruth Awad has an MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Diode, Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, Anti-, Vinyl Poetry, Epiphany, The Drunken Boat, and in the anthologies The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), New Poetry from the Midwest 2014 (New American Press, 2015), and Poets on Growth (Math Paper Press, 2015). She won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest, and she was a finalist for the 2013 Ruth Lily Fellowship. She loves animals, but none more than her two Pomeranians.

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