Letitia Jiju​
​

Easy as Aleph
for Goofy

On each side, the squat, twisted olives
fan an oasis bent in Syriac noon ܢܢ --

in Arabic, spread like a boat
lugging a green sun. An upside-down
tusk in Aramaic. A tomb’s jaw in Hebrew.
A lightning aspect to touch in Phoenician.

Even so, the cheerful, dream-footed
atom where existence is merely observed
probability. An electron is its own nictating
lizard everywhere until peered at

like a split string bean. How strange then,
for all my wild, if the world hadn’t seen
me beside you, laughing, easy as aleph,
I couldn’t have lived.

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Letitia Jiju has work published/forthcoming in Passages North, PRISM International, trampset, Moist Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She reads poetry for Psaltery & Lyre.