Melanie Rivera   LAST NIGHT                                                             for Taha Muhammad Ali when the first bomb fell on my Saffuriya I piled all the dirty dishes of my poems the bent forks and bit straws of my favorite prayers flew them first-class explosive via carrier pigeon to the place where the Earth kisses up to the Cosmos. seconds later I rethought my act of aggression prayed the Keeper wouldn’t notice and return to my street with his current of bullets a brown shirt on his back, a rusted scissor in his coat to cut off my tongue for a table cloth.  I don’t remember the soundness of my sleep last night how many times I prayed penance before my tower exploded and hunks of my body became birthday balloons each piece screaming Amen in a new bloody language impossible to reconcile. CAGE                     the year I was ten my sister eight cousin jay pushed back the couches turned my grandmother’s kitchen into a wire cage. my sister and I were pitbulls sharp teeth   red eyes oozing at the lips praying for a knockdown in the first round before the other’d  wheeze with asthma and jay would stop the fight. often neither one would win my sister’s hand to her rattling chest my face a tomato off the vine. we’d separate and Jay’d offer two sets of score cards promising each revenge a bite to the bone    next time. Virginia Rosario People of the Forest   HABIT my father had a habit of loving women who hold pictures of crack pipes in their skulls   years after the bowls are clean. and of loving them desperately – a dog abandoned in a burning apartment digging his nails into the walls yelping and choking on the smoke. sometimes I feel I am my mother ........born with a habit of leaving my father the type of woman who can hear a phone ring and ring learn to sleep louder than the grown man whimpering outside the apartment door.   TURNS I am finding you in the phone book trying to call before Mother gets home slamming the telephone when no one answers pretending you are at work or asleep. Your blood knocks in my blood every year on my birthday I turn 12 you die and I say the knocking is silent I tell myself I knew you seven years not nearly enough to break me up when you died like an egg yolk breaks around a fork the shell of your memory bone-white and thin. Still beneath every poem is a prayer that turns like the face of a flower, back to you.     Melanie Rivera is an undergraduate student at American University majoring in Literature. She has been published in MARY, a literary journal, and in the anthology DC Poets Against the War (2nd edition, Argonne Press, 2004). She was the first place winner of the 2004 Mt. Vernon Poetry Festival.  Her most recent work attempts to unearth her own conceptions of cultural, familial, and class identity, while bearing witness to perceived injustices within her country and other areas of the world. Melanie serves as Writer-In-Residence at the Mt. Pleasant Neighborhood Public Library, and as Program Coordinator of Punto Vivo, a literary reading series held at the Library on the first Tuesday of every month. For more information on Punto Vivo or other literary programs at the Mt. Pleasant library, contact her directly at MelanieSRivera@yahoo.com. Published in Volume 6, Number 2, Spring 2005.