Michael Fleming

Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. . . . In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word “raisin” understood implicitly . . . not unsullied maidens or houris.
—Ibn Warraq, The Guardian, January 11, 2002

The maître d’ is sharply groomed, in tie

and tails, he greets you warmly, Welcome, sir!

We’ve been expecting you! And as you eye

the virgins at the bar, selecting, certain

of your righteous consequence, a waiter

approaches with a bright, blinding smile,

and on his fingertips, elaborately

wrought, a silver tray with something piled

beneath a silken napkin. Sir! he says,

plucking off the silk, Before we begin,

your seventy-two raisins! Let us praise

Him! With that, he vanishes in a thin

blue wisp of smoke. The virgins are gone. You

invoke your god. A low voice answers, Who?

Traffic Stop

It’s just these glasses, officer, I swear—

they’re progressives and I’m still getting used

to peering through this tube of startling clarity

amidst a blur of color—blues

like this undersea mountaintop, these reds

like bloody marys, these greens like Vermont,

like forests suddenly summer, like dead

presidents, like love—out here where we want

to be beautiful, here where it’s just me,

you, and the universe, a voice to say

that all is well, everything’s fine, you’re free

to go now, ma’am—you can be on your way.

Hot Cherry Pie

I always stopped there, the Madonna Inn—

that pink and copper shrine on the way down

the missionary coast, along the thin

thread of mother church’s outpost towns—

San Francisco, San José, Santa Clara—

rosary beads a day’s walk from one

to the next, or now an hour by car

but still with sacramental purpose. None

of that franchise crap for me. I pulled off

the freeway, San Luís Obispo, hungry

for hot cherry pie and hot black coffee,

body and blood for a soul wrung

out and wasted. Then that one time I spotted

those kids—a boy at the men’s room door,

poised to push, his eyes fixed on a girl not

quite his age, maybe a bit older, or

a little further along in the game,

obviously the one in charge, standing there

at the women’s, stock still until she aimed

her eyes at his and whispered: Go. I dare

you. With that they were lost for good behind

those doors—or for better or for worse, who

the hell knows? I paid up and continued my

mission to Santa Bárbara—to you.

for Ellen R.

Born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, Mike Fleming set out on a long, winding path: undergraduate work at Princeton, teaching English in refugee camps in Thailand, a graduate degree from Oxford, teaching high-school mathematics in Swaziland, work as a carpenter, hospice volunteer, and college composition teacher in California, living as a writer and editor in New York, New Hampshire, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. You can see more of Fleming’s work at www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws