from Names.

• Author: Hacker, Marilyn
• Position: Poem - Poem

Four firelit mirrors lining the Corsican restaurant's walls reflected divergences-- Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, expat Russian, expat Jewish American. A new war had begun that afternoon; The shrinking world shrieked its emergencies well beyond our capabilities if not to understand, to intervene, though Mourad, who practices medicine has made of intervention a career. Khaled spent decades studying history in the jaws, shall we say, of an emergency. Start another bottle of rough-tongued wine, that sanguine glitter in the midnight mirror Edinburgh airport seems provincial when you're headed back to CDG/Roissy in dusty sunlight of a mid-July midday. I had an hour. But there was Hind (we'd been at the same conference all weekend) who had three connections: Heathrow, Cairo, Beirut, where the runways had been bombed, to Damascus. With airport Starbucks, we brainstormed the thesis-in-progress she'll have to write in English if she's going to publish it: Lesbian writers from the Arab world. Boarding call. I don't know if she got home. I e-mailed her. I haven't heard from her. The war had started five days...