Look at the moon to the left. Ramadhan Kareem

between me and keyboard and directly under my nose sits a small, curvy, porcelain yellow bowl full of oats, granola, raisins, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon, baked with slices of ripe fall peaches.

its heat rises and meets the bottom of my jaw.

it's the season of fasting from sunrise to sunset, arriving this time in fall

--the lunar month steadily creeping up ten days every solar year, earlier and earlier into the season of extended daylight--

but still, nonetheless, set in the half year of shortening days.

one and a half more minutes to eat breakfast everyday.
eating a date one and a half minutes earlier everyday.

three minute daily and cumulative gifts
as endurance, necessarily silent, stretches over time
and the days rush increasingly into one another towards Eid.

-fasting: the work of rendering hunger invisible for a spiritual nourishment that you pretend feeds you
-fasting: knowing that what you 'bear' is meaningless middle class deprivation
-fasting: disgust at the distorted cultural edifice in which you have been taught to fast
-fasting: imposing loss on yourself with an anger sublimated evenly over days into hunger
-fasting: choosing self-imposed enforcement.

but the instant the overspiced salt and pepper fruit chaats, cups of creamy tea, early morning parathas, drugged extra hour's sleep, constipation and diarrhea, exhortations to eat the crinkly brown dates being held up to your sour dry mouth (because that's what the prophet ate), and group prayers kneeling behind familiar and hated male butts bulky with wallets and testicles become too much--

--blood gets called in--

with as much mysterious and slightly hysterical hype as the annual slightly incompetent and factionally-contested sighting of the moon, except this event is personal, feminine and inner

and that's your out.

after all, some periods are spiritual.

these were the textures and deprivations of order and in-order
desire, hunger and hatred
mysterious miniscule tips, salt and cream
towards and against
the earth, the sun, and the moon