Hypertensive

Rasha Alkhateeb

You could be the prettiest housewife and a pressure

cooker could explode in your face, my neighbor says.

She serves guests with foam because she’s missing

glass from her set. I saw her cup implode in her hands

last time. She describes homemade high blood pressure

like trapped steam without boil, an opened vessel

resting between beats.

When she lost her glass, she said harm had been broken,

as if folklore were fact. Her home is a volume of vented air,

with housewives waiting for their cups to turn cold before

they go back and like a thermometer, their pins drop.

She says cookers save time for foods that foam, not pulses

with skin bursting impatiently. She looks like vapor, thin

against thick glass, unable to withstand wind, that violent breath.

I watched tea slip into her interlocked handle, her fingers

were sealed like a ring around the cusp. She encircles her living

room like a round gasket, preventing spillage as if every woman’s

problem is her own. Her hands are tense veins on the surface

of released control until everyone is back home again.

I feel burned by her life, by those scalds that turn on the skin

like betrayed valves. I’m the first to finish, I want to leave.

Rasha Alkhateeb is a Palestinian-American poet and received her MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from The University of Baltimore.