by Omar Sakr
men. None of them knew how to touch without
wounding and all of them touched
instinctively. This is what they taught me,
to trust the lesson the gasp imparts. Yaani I strip
back the skin not to bare the fault lines
but to know: it is possible to ask too much
of a colour, which is to say light. Together
they insist on revealing blood, as if blood,
especially the human kind, can’t tell a lie
or turn against itself, when its first narrative
was one of expulsion, and its first product was Cain.
Do you see? My grandfather and his children, my mother
& my body, my body and itself. Always turning
away from a country. The truth is: it is easy to give
trauma a body. To a body. I mean, it wants to be made
visible, a transformation often
mistaken for a miracle, a healing action. Like light
I love to dance before mirrors naked, rude,
dripping. This is what you are here for: the epiphany
of my flesh, the violent manifesto, the prophecy divined
through diaspora, the spilled guts of sacrificial
animals opening a new future,
the many born of one.
ii.
I strip back my flesh my bloody ego. Come
meet me at the juncture of knee & history,
here my bestial memories cluster
in glorious hymnal each beak and snout
and jowl closeting a secret, an ordinariness,
a child, a lust. I rule over them, an abject king,
an ungovernable queen with a heel on every
throat. Don’t listen to me. Hear the humming
insects digging in, which is the sound of Mum
gargling in the kitchen snorting a line
straight out of this suburban kingdom
and into a place of her own. I keep inventing
a place for her to own. My ego again.
It never lasts, my fantasy, be it Lebanon
or a bone forest or an unlikely
evergreen, a thriving joyful something—
instead, memory
overwhelms everything & I see a coastal city
that spells her father’s addictive name, that shreds
her girlhood where she staggers through the heat,
an axe in hand, ready to make beautiful
his body with an old ruin & slake
a different kind of thirst. I have learned
to ask too much of beauty, to beg it
for vengeance
and still, it answers.
iii.
I strip back my bones, leave only a sovereign
melancholia, a light in pieces, a glittering I don’t dare
hold. In shattered mirrors my father is still
alive, his eyes a web of red, a laugh curving
his lips, waiting for me to turn and acknowledge
his terrible throne. This is the trouble
with faith, it fathers and leaves you
with children who refuse to die
Out on the Way to Melbourne
i.
a boy embalmed by the sun
cricket bat held high
pools of mud by spent tractors
and unspent men
stray cattle gracing the grazing
fields, oozing methane
a winding wooden spine nailed to hills,
a continuous crucifixion—
i pass over it untouched, a desire
thrumming through
half-heard half-hearted
lacking the conviction
of this ugly flower, a clenched fist
of beaten gold.
ii.
this morning, i woke up & forgot
how to pray.
i scrambled for god
the correct sequence of words
the rhythm
beneath it all. i strained
& mumbled, a note here, an amen there
like the night before, sweating
hallelujah in heat
bodies like confessional boxes long
unused & full of secrets.
as the day withdraws i am out
in the canola fields, trying to recall
what faith is and to resist
the voice softly saying, throw yourself
into the nearest burning bush.
do not listen if it speaks to you—
simply burn.
iii.
i leave country behind
sick pastoral ghosts & mad cows
uttering fag fag fag
or maybe it was fog,
soft song of confusion. i
don’t blame the animals,
they only repeat what they hear.
back in my devastated home
land, i am a vulgar prince
with an invader’s tongue
in my mouth & i love it.
i go to the olive groves
ready to wear a dress of flame
and a hundred pitted eyes say:
history is one long receipt &
all our names are on it.
A Beautiful Child
after Jericho Brown
You are not as tired of diaspora
poetry as I am of the diaspora. Sometimes
I thank God that I was born inside an American
-made tank. Sometimes I weep within
the beast. My uncle works on the railroads
and goes home to his nuclear family loathing
my queerness from afar. He and I tend
our silence, a beautiful child
until it speaks. Another uncle is a guard
with two ex-wives and a secret love
of comic books. Tragedy made him the head
of his family too soon. Don’t weep for your dad
he said, weep for me. “You didn’t know him
like I did.” I have a third uncle, a mechanic
who visits his home in Lebanon every year
& now I must admit English has failed me.
I should say kholo, my mother’s brother.
I should say umja, my father’s brother
so you know which branch of the tree to cut—or
cherish. My uncles are doused in industry, good sons
of the State. They get on with what needs
getting on. Language is their least favourite
daughter. They use their mouths for breath
and do their best to forget the world
outside. I think they love where they come
from but in truth, I have never heard them
say so, except to mutter they do not want
to pay taxes in two countries come on
one is killing them already &
isn’t that enough
Choose Your Own Erasure
In a Field She Twirls, Arms Akimbo & the World Stops
to Watch (or: Happiness)
In this poem, my mother has no purpose
beyond existing, beyond beauty, beyond
dancing beneath the stars. Let me give
way before meaning, let me incoherent,
let me give her this one shining moment.
In a Field We Twirl, Arms Akimbo & the World Stops
(or: Grief)
In this poem, trauma is not the villain
to whom all blame is allocated, trauma
has no cape, no moustache to twirl, no
body to act through, no blood to poison
& my mother knows precisely the harm
she is causing. She knows its name.
She calls it: his story. She makes it ours.
In a Field, the World (or: Rage)
In this poem, a country is unwinnable,
unwoundable, unowned. It never
justifies killing people. It does not want
our bodies. It lives, and loves the living.
It knows no other way and resists
whenever we try to teach it otherwise.
In a Field (or: Denial)
In this poem, absence is recalibrated.
Absence is a deer springing over logs.
It is flighty but incapable of damaging
you intangibly. It can still stand still
on a road, and cause a car to crash
or swerve into a monstrous silence,
the kind that follows any arrival.
In (or: Acceptance)
In this poem, I am a boy desiring
other boys without consequence,
I suck dick with abandon, fear free
from my tongue. I am beholden
not to desire but to myself, my love,
the women, the men, all of us
fixated on the thresholds
of bliss or a way to displace
for a second or an hour
the exit that haunts the body.
Federation (Square)
This place reminds me of a Holocaust
memorial, an uneven jumble of stones,
architecture twisting my vision.
Only this is meant to be beautiful.
I don’t know what it remembers,
if it can speak to that other square
in a distant city burdened with memory,
to the makers of it & to those who desire
to dip a slender milky foot into history,
a kind of accessible suffering captured
on camera. You know the solemn ones
in their duty-free sunglasses or else
unbearably in love, smiling.
There is no good way to be here
or anywhere else. At least there
are trams, trains, buses, and cabs;
we need as many ways to flee
as possible. You can leave this poem
every 8 minutes in any number of directions
new meaning arrives. Perhaps it’s better
to say arises, that it struggles out the earth or
wafts free off the wide back of the mud
brown river or falls from the long low head
of a tree. New doesn’t mean better,
remember once the other is elsewhere,
it’s hard to get back. Maybe impossible.
I don’t blame the open for what comes.
Everything reminds me of the dead.
My ghosts are as noisy as the colony
of gulls pecking food from my hands.
The Lost Arabs
for my dear Najwan
In the kingdom of lost Arabs, every rock is a beautiful
separatist until you spit on it.
In some cultures spit is a benediction.
Give me the waters of your tongue, any wet word
can soothe a silent throat and mine
keeps closing over my mother, grandmother,
and even my slowest, least kind cousins
who can speak with the thick voice of our people
and who, with each sloshing mouthful, locate
themselves in our country. My teeth
dream of the three nations that yellow
their bone. I wet their edges,
a clueless cartographer who has never known a hill
or a river that wasn’t stolen from someone
and so can never know their true shape.
When I look at our names, all I see are squiggly lines.
Would you believe I keep trying to find the poetry
in a wound? How foolish. How graceless. And yet:
a man who knows his history told me it was in my blood.
What idiot put it there?
Maybe this is why I have spilled so much of it on the blade
of authenticity. Cut down
those I deemed false, all the others I loved—and love—
but refused to become. Every day
my certainty collapses. That I am lost. Or can be found.
That there is such a thing as Arab.
None of this is real, it exists only in your mind,
the stone I cleaved with this sword.
Pull it out if you can, if you dare a kingdom
awaits the steady
hands of a new butcher. I confess myself
unequal to the task.
Where God Is
The jihadi in his cargos and camo, his fake beard and sunnies, stands bowlegged
in the desert/ed parking lot. He has no quiver of arrows, but a belt of gold teeth,
a wicked / smile looped around his chest. He looks like my cousin / as he squints
at me, ready to spit. / “Where can you find God?” / he says. They ask this of every poet
or faggot or Westerner / my not-cousin assures me / they are all poets. He swears
he is not my cousin / refuses me his name. / I am sweating like a used horse. I hate
games / I can’t win. / There are two answers. The first is now/here, as glory is beyond
small / animals. We live in the absence of divinity, and by our actions / hope to create
an echo here, to call it back. The other / answer is everywhere: heaven / in torn Coke
cans, in my dirty / armpit, in laundry, in a brothel / deluged with rain, in every single
breath sucked in by living things, the dead / echoing. I say nothing / full of the stink
of myself. The man / who could be my cousin—this is to say I could love him—laughs,
puts a cold black mouth to my ear / and I hear, “Listen. / You will find God here.”
Then the angels started barking
Searchlight
I lay above this poem as I lay above my body
watching it all go wrong. I, the Arab cannot
enter this space. I, the Arab am not just
an Arab. I have another mad blood
product of a con man and a junkie—sorry,
substance abuse(r)—I, the Arab am
familiar with a relentless need, with never
having enough, a cracked cup
that mocks notions of being half of anything.
Whatever I have dribbles out, dews
the fracture. I, the Arab am surrounded
by a blast radius where a tree should be
& so I am always in mourning. I desire
the shade of those long branches,
the particular shape of a hundred names
whether all of them were shady sand-fuckers
turning tricks in a trashy gutter or worse,
capitalists, which is to say, soldiers
of fortune. Anyway, someone surely must
have been good, or known the joyous
thrum of a song or being held as a son
by a human who loves you
even if later on they kicked in your teeth.
None of this is what I wanted
to say in search of my inheritance,
that sad will-o’-wisp, leader of the lost
and soon to be drowned. I want to drink
in these marshes, make my mouth glow
with mushroom bloom but my jaw,
so like my grandfa
ther’s, is cracked
& leaking. This is my legacy, dear
children: an endless migration
to what was or might have been,
the manacles of a horrid imagination
and somewhere I swear to God
the Most Merciful, a smile, praise.
Every Day
Every day I say a prayer for Palestine
And every day a dog runs away with it
Vanishing down an alley, tail wagging
To benefit who knows which wretch.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter who receives
The gift of my kindness. Such lovely lies
We bestow upon ourselves. Sometimes
I am the dog fleeing with a bastard’s
Love clenched in my slavering jaw.
Sometimes I am the one curled at the end
Of an alley, blessed by the unexpected
Warmth of a snuffling mouth telling
Me I am not forgotten. Every day
I say a prayer for Palestine
Do Not Rush
to make a judgment.
You can savage a body at speed.
A city can be ruined in an hour.
A love of decades dashed in a second.
It takes nine months to start a life.
It should take as long to end one.
After a trigger is pulled and before
a bullet lands, give nine months
to the target to welcome the hole,
to accept the blood, the blunt lead,
the new body. I know it is possible
to allow a death to gestate. Watch
time mushroom out from a bomber
and seasons unfurl on the city below.
Spring in Baghdad to winter in Aleppo,
one final semester of learning, a retreat
by a river, time enough to be thankful
for old books and DVDs borrowed,
to study the bullet or the blast with
a lover’s eye. It seems a short goodbye
but last year alone America dropped
26,171* bombs on brown bodies,
on our trees and animals and homes.
That’s 235,539 months or 19,628 years
to process the devastation of one.
Honestly, I am unsure of the maths.
Give or take a week, millenniums
are still owed to the lost. I don’t know
how to calculate for the land or
the numbers for the unlucky survivors,
the dust-strewn rubble-reapers looking
for family in red rocks, for burned
paper that might hold a shred of name,
for safe waters that will not drown
them, for borders that will not cut
their feet or demand they unstitch
history from their backs. Call it
