Glass dives off table,
marrying flesh
Eyes widen, in
shock and rage

Then another glass,
constructed in forgotten
Chinese factory, is hurled
from hand, from the
same direction but toward
the other end of the table.

The two flying glasses’
trajectories made an X,
each shattering after hitting
wooden tabletop and
splaying out shards which
land on mosquito-flooded floor

Afterwards, the daughter, temporally “home”
from her new abode overseas,
tore into her mother, the
first hurler, with swords –
“I will kill you when you sleep!”
“Even your old boyfriends cared
more for me than you did!”
“You killed my dad by being
a constant bitch!”
—
And in a dust cloud,
we are in hazy Dhaka in 1992,
where a young, fearless woman with
her daughter raged against society
and its religion. The people, in
turn, responded with equal spite –
outside a mosque, on buses that didn’t
accommodate the Hindu palate
and in a “road rage” incident
These traumas would embalm the child’s
dreams with fervid nightmare

stimuli
After the mother had swaggeringly
recounted a story of her quarreling with
worshippers outside Newmarket
mosque, a laser beam set off
the child’s nightmare, and the daughter had
awoken as a married adult.
She bitterly complained to her mother
of her past rage against society, which had
precipitated flying shards
of glass from the mother’s hand