Tracy Faud
from We Felt the Past Burn and It Warmed Us
It isn’t true that ostriches bury their heads in the sand in the face of oncoming danger. The behavior most likely mistaken as such is the tending of offspring, the careful rotation of eggs in their nest, ensuring even incubation. Ostriches practice cooperative breeding. In the King James Bible, it is written that the mother ostrich “leaveth her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers.” In truth, the crystalline calcite shell of the ostrich egg is so hard that no natural predator can break it. As hard as a penny, on the Mohs Scale of Hardness. One would need a club or hammer. One egg is nutritionally equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs. To gather ostrich eggs as the Babylonians did was a dangerous game. The mature ostrich is capable of giving a kick with an outstretched leg, known to kill a person, or a lion. The male ostrich has a long and fleshy penis. The Arabian Ostrich, native to this land, where it roamed until it went extinct in the year of my father’s birth.
They’ve got a lot of sand over there, the president was saying. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with. The Kurds, he said, they aren’t angels. They aren’t angels. We paid a lot of money for them to fight with us and that’s OK. They’ve been fighting for hundreds of years, he said. They’ve been fighting for three hundred years. They’ve been fighting for one thousand years. Angels, twice misspelled as angles on closed captioning.
North of here, in Lebanon, tens of thousands hold hands to form a human chain that stretches the length of the country. The Sumerian language has been decoded, but no one can say how it was pronounced. Still, on YouTube, Peter Pringle sings a Babylonian love song, holding the long-necked gishgudi in the ruins of the great temple.
When I first learned to read, for a time I thought that the word naked rhymed with snaked. Naked. I loosely understood its meaning but did not connect it to the other word I knew for undressed.
Maybe dead languages all sound the same. They sound like a longing to be spoken.
A mountain between Kurdish and Turkish territory had only two stars on Google Maps. One night, we will suddenly end up on your hill, writes Salihcan (one star). We will burn you with the mountains. Data was shooting through cables on the ocean floor at twenty terabits a second. Elsewhere scientists were heralding the success of their attempts to lure fish back to dying coral reefs by broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs on underwater loudspeakers, a catfishing of fish.
Most things run out, an ad for a retirement plan begins.
The sky, chock-full of planes, according to flight radar.
Outside, it had begun to snow.
A slow-mo video of a kiss blown by Alice, the model scout who held my hand aboard a flight to Istanbul so turbulent the flight attendants went white and ran to the back of the plane.
Sometimes I understood others. Other times that window was opaque.
A bag full of hair on the roadside.
A typo in the recipe instructed me to use a mortal to crush the garlic.
A friend wrote to show me the painting she’d produced with the Love is Art Paint Kit, which came with a plastic tarp, an oversized canvas, body-safe paint and a soft body scrubber.
Innana’s love song to Dumuzi: my well-stocked garden of the plain, my barley towing high in its furrow, my apple tree which bears fruit up to its crown, he is lettuce planted by the water. My eager impetuous caresser of the navel, my caresser of the soft thighs, he is the one my womb loves best, he is lettuce planted by the water.
Desert sand is too smooth for use by industry, the driving winds sculpting each grain into a spherical shape. Rather, sand for use in making concrete must be dredged up from the ocean floor, which it is, by the billions of tons each year.
Gafar wrote to suggest that I change my career. One little decision changes the whole future. I have done that a few times and changed my life. This gave me an interesting life which I have enjoyed very much.
Seventy tons of old dates seized from a warehouse in Baghdad, their expirations stickers removed and replaced with a later expiration date.
At the expat pizza bar a war photographer who’d just returned from Russia told me of Assad’s army in Moscow, tanks performing Swan Lake, a joint display of force.
Make yourself a Lord for as little as $49.95 today.
I’m living in Europe in my mind, says one auntie to another.
On the plane from Berlin to Hewlêr, I’d sat beside a bald man who cried while watching Seinfeld on his laptop for the duration of the trip.
A Jean_Luc kept disagreeing with my tagging of plants on iNaturalist. Without fruit and basal leaves it is very hazardous to give a name to a Brassicaceae, he commented on the plant I had tagged as wild mustard.
Aboutnot7 defended my identification of Morning Glory to a purple flower growing wild in the meridian of Empire World. He wrote that, considering the cordate leaves with dentate margin visible on background and the location, the only possible species should be Convolvulus Stachydifolius. I agreed with his tag, and the observation was upgraded to research quality.
On YouTube Gracie R. is twirling behind a desk chair to Beethoven’s Moonlight.
An unwitting video of a bee in slow motion. The bee large and black and in the halting playback and moving very much like the drones that I’d watched hover over the soon-to-be married posing in frozen embraces at Empire World as friends and relatives released bunches of balloons around them, captured by the drone controlled by an assistant at a distance.
I, too, felt remotely controlled; tugged by the aggregate values displayed by those I followed.
A song I knew from youth piped out at the Lucid Café behind the bazaar.
For some time after the ostrich, before the new kebab shop disappeared, its empty cage remained. Then it was dismantled, its former presence only evidenced by the postage stamp of trampled grass.
In the valley of the highest mountain peak in Kurdistan grew wild peas, salvia indica, huge, faded crown imperial and Siberian lilies, a rockrose with lemon yellow blossoms, pale purple cornflowers, tall fuchsia clovers and plumeless thistle with artichoke-like heads; sprays of flowering parsnip, purple field gladiolas. Giant woodland tulips with pocked petals nodded on their stalks. Most of the flowers I recognized as uncultivated versions of ones available for purchase in garden and grocery stores.
In the center of the valley, what looked like romaine sprung in gargantuan heads beside the tiny creek at its center. Lettuce by the water.
It was easy to imagine how wild sheep here had been driven and penned in between steep walls, then bred for tameness by repeated culling of the most aggressive rams.
The dollar had never been stronger.
One gram of brain tissue might contain, by weight, a half percent of plastic.
Light and air, the primary forces that cause a CD or DVD to degrade, a process known as disc rot. The scanning laser can no longer read the data encoded in the pits which are too small for the human eye to see at all. The music becomes scrambled.
There was Safeen, grainy on the back of my eyelids, smiling at me in the dark.
Oil that stained the spiritless grass where it leaked from the deafening generators, on which a mural of Bambi had been painted.
I wasn’t suffering from a lack of beauty but an inability to absorb it. Did the flowers, with their distinctive lobing, want to be recognized by a machine’s eye?
Plants are passive maters; they wait, with their dusted stamens and petals flopped open, or with a narrow tubular bloom, room only for certain pollinators, which they attract with pigments within the spectrum visible to humans and beyond it, in frequencies only the bees see, or exuding scent, or cupping fragrant nectar, bent on the chance of sex at a distance, a jostling insect dislodging the pollen of possible mates in the brief weeks or days of their prime.
If the right pollen reaches the pistil’s sticky end, it will travel the length of the style and fertilize the ovum, and in that dark place, if conditions are right, gametes that meet will mature into seed. And then it begins again.
Tracy Fuad is the author of two collections of poetry, PORTAL and about:blank. She lives in Berlin, and directs the Berlin Writers' Workshop.