Light, Displaced (Tangiers)

Mint tea in a blue-walled labyrinth, wasps flashing like teeth in air. Trumpets sway the heads of cobra while shadows catcall, timeless as holyman smiles. ‘Salaam Alaikum!’ the cry, bags of sea urchin thrust into cracks of old daylight. ‘You want?’ Dusk is smuggling a market into place under bare-faced electric globes. Donkeys clatter. Fingers caress a wrong turn of lost pockets as nicotine cloud twirls with the chatter of spice sellers: ‘when He wants you, Ali Baba’ a butter-knife voice, skimming the yellow night, ‘a fist shall be closed around your heart.’ On the rooftops, the goats. Imams are calling words into centuries of prayer, monotone into the answering sky.