An Evening Among the Fig and Olive Trees
Yasmine Azzi

We find a smooth rock and you make funny faces as laughter envelopes us
Looking up at the perfect night’s sky
Constellations illuminate the pupils of our eyes, envious of the supernovas we contain.
I come up with fake stories about made-up stars and tell you I learned them in an astronomy class
That I never took.
Fig and olive trees canopy around us
Cradling our bodies close to the earth, lest we float away in the lightness of our youth and warm
breeze.
I think about how much we appreciate the warmth after a cold rainy weekend
Only to be annoyed by it a few months later in the scorching summer heat.
I think illness works the same way.
We don’t acknowledge the tangibility of our bodies until they start to fail us
Until something breaks, we often don’t notice it existed at all.
How different life would be if we recognized the screen before it’s cracked,
appreciating it for all it shows us.
How different would medicine be?
Our bodies are in constant dialectical opposition with entropy.
Pull me towards chaos.
Let me be an atom expanding through time and space.
Maybe then I’ll discover the secrets of the universe—
If there are any to be discovered at all