Tod Ibrahim   UNBUILDING for B They demolished the building this week that stood for years near the courthouse. It reminded me of you and your wife, because we watched the fireworks from its roof five months before your winter wedding. As I saw the wrecking ball whack masonry walls, heard demolition hammers chop floor slabs, breathed clouds of concrete dust, I was reminded of fireworks.  When its frame became clearer, when I understood its structure—the relationship between columns and girders—I saw unbuilding is like your marriage, which failed to last three seasons.  Should she have left sooner, admitted the lost attraction, said she was drawn to you no longer?  You’ll never know why the designs failed, why she stopped loving. Your best man in church and witness in court, I played the same part: promising to serve as a rubble chute, carrying debris from the top of the building to the transfer box to the street.   RETURNING HOME 12 HOURS APART This is the moment I love you most: at 30,000 feet between Albuquerque and LAX, headed west to catch the redeye east to DC and return to you after a week together.  Our separate trips home help me understand you matter more than my need to carry my father’s meanness, to hold him close, away from you—like the winter moon white against the sky, against the blue sky before sunset in Santa Fe—against my chest last night as you slept within me. With the continent between us, I feel the lost moment: your chest bare to my back, your heart full to my meaning, eclipses him. Sherman Fleming Arrow fractal design illustration see more work by Sherman Fleming     DECORATING THE NURSERY DURING A WAR Because the OBGYN is concerned about Allison’s size, the baby getting too big, we visit the clinic for a glucose test the morning of the first Saturday of the war. While we wait, I half-watch Tommy Franks brief on CNN, half-listen to my wife, half-read the Post.  After the test, we eat before getting paint for the nursery. Allison wants bright colors, flowers, and bugs, while I’m concerned this is too girlish, even though we’re to have a daughter in three months. We agree on Arabian Nights, with exotic colors and tents, palms and camels, sand on sand. My father died just after the first Gulf War, and I wonder how he would feel about this one. He came to the states in the late 50s, just after Nassar took charge, when people in Columbus, Ohio, called Egyptians “Nigger” instead of “Arab.”  With lighter skin and straighter hair, my father heard this less, although my mother’s father still rejected them as animals—until I, his only grandson, was born. After we get the paint, Allison drops me off at the airport for a business trip to San Diego. When I return, the plane on takeoff arcs left over city and Pacific, pausing between blues. The ocean from this height is like skin up close without hair, blood blue instead of mocha, the pattern the same due to whiteless chops in water.  To bypass my father’s heart, the surgeon used vein from his leg, which was shaved clean. As I look at the Pacific, my father for the first time meets my wife, holds the granddaughter he’ll never love, her body white as folded clouds, smooth as a man faded and dying.     THE BODY OUTSIDE Twice now I’ve seen the shuttle fail, once on take off in a cloud, once landing. Both times, I had the same dream: Fly, fall, fire, fall, white through slipstream between space and space, the blue out, dissolution before land, my body so outside itself wind becomes a limb, debris spread wide through stratosphere. The first time I was alone, now I have you, with child six months away, a girl we know from three lines in science— seemingly perfect.  From our fragments, each day, we telemetrically construct her. The difference between dreams apart: We hold hands in no world and release our coming daughter to stars and earth.     WHEN PLANETS ALIGN after DWC Danny Gatton’s guitar fills sky, feedback inside the Beltway, overexposes stars the way Buddy Holly touches West Texas: Midland-Odessa to Lubbock, nothing between but oil, then farmland, the ground empty as the sky full. The five naked-eye planets align with the sun and moon as my wife and I sleep. While her family in Odessa witnesses this syzygy, my wife, in our Virginia bed, continues to dream. She sees in her sleep, eyes blue to Neptune. She hears between signs, a minds-ear to Mars. She smells night, sunflower to Jupiter. She touches my thigh, open to Venus. She tastes the earth, mouth to Mercury.     A two-time recipient of George Washington University’s Jenny McKean Moore scholarship for poets, Tod Ibrahim has a Master’s Degree in Liberal Arts from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of Maryland at College Park.  At Maryland, he was Poetry Editor of the Calvert Literary Review.  Since 1995, Tod has served as a reader for the Washington Prize for poetry, which is sponsored by The Word Works.  In 2001, he joined the “Pick-A-Poet” program at elementary schools in Arlington, Virginia.  Tod has studied with Lucille Clifton, John Haines, Rod Jellema, Linda McCarriston, and Stanley Plumly.  The Arlington County Cultural Affairs Division and the Arlington Department of Public Works selected his poem, “The Kent Narrows,” for “Moving Words” in 2001.  Currently, he is Executive Vice President of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine. Published in Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2006.