The next string of lights

I saw past the microscopic pixels of my phone screen today.

They made a portal, showing me something small but bright.

Strings of lights suspended

between tents, metal sign posts, and vending carts,

over a path glowing golden for Ramadan.

The orange dust kicked up off the road at twilight

reached my nose through the portal, and I heard the

soft distant sizzling of portable stove fires, the

dull scrape of two brothers crushing garlic cloves

in the clay bowls they had spun from the earth two months prior.

This street no longer has buildings,

but you can see homes

- tents, tarps, short walls of brick

that were molded at night and stacked a week later,

mattresses small enough to carry

but big enough for the family.

Barefoot children run,

laughing and pulling on each other’s arms,

trying to be the first to add and

turn on the next string of lights in the sequence,

their laughter punctuating

the humming

of generators and drones.

In the space between the dense clay below

and the stars blinking reluctantly awake above,

is a celebration that cannot be killed,

under a tunnel of lights

in a city with no electrical grid.