My father’s unclenching faith craters the sofa, making it hard to imagine he is my flesh.

We discuss that plane crash in the Andes. He doesn’t outrightly say he would eat my flesh.

That time I turned my back, train hurtling through disembowelled countryside, whole bodies

of water submerging trees. Birds unable to land. Phone buzzing. No text or goodbye. Flesh

that splits open, makes space between your fingers; the unhugging of a suture, of a date to break

the fast. Ramadan brings odd dreams; raw kebabs eating themselves inward. We crucify flesh

that creates flesh, and the incubator that accommodates, nourishes, foreign danger. The Prophet

had visitors bring up whatever was in their stomachs. Bulimic confessions. No sin, just dry flesh.

When Lot’s wife ‘turned her back’ and became a grain of salt in his pupil, blocking light’s entry

beyond his body, did it sting? Was it condemnation? Did she already know the end, ‘thy flesh

and thy body consumed?’ We can watch planes crash. We refuse to imagine the way hell

caved over Sodom. The red disbelief at an ever-closer Mars, an unseen breaching of sky. Flesh

which will burn, not from sin, but from prophets, men who cannot sever pleasure from body,

from blood. Men who leave their wives, rush to any unbeing, to any voice that can defy flesh.