The Lost Arabs
For Candy Royalle,
gone too soon but never lost
&
my brother, Mohomad,
without whom I could not do what I do
Here We Are
People don’t seem to understand.
They say no, look, hell is over where the grass is
greener. Or no, look, it’s where blood drenches
everything. Nobody wants to reckon with
the truth of this place. A palace in hell is still
in hell. Freedom of movement in hell is still—listen,
hell is any place where someone is being tortured
and we have been here for the longest time.
Contents
Here We Are
Boys with Their Pins Pulled
As the Bombed City Swells (in a Viral Video)
Hanging Dry in Athens
House of Beirut
This Is Not Meant for You
On the Way to Sydney
How to destroy the body slowly
Fridays in the Park (or how to make a boy holy)
Ameen
How to be a son
Sailor’s Knot
Arabs in Space
What It Is to Be Holy
How to destroy the body slowly (2)
Breath
Birthday
Ordinary Things
Factoids
Chances
Instead, Memory
Out on the Way to Melbourne
A Beautiful Child
Choose Your Own Erasure
Federation (Square)
The Lost Arabs
Where God Is
Searchlight
Every Day
Do Not Rush
AT THE SITE OF THE FUTURE MEMORIAL
AT THE SITE OF THE FUTURE MEMORIAL
AT THE SITE OF THE FUTURE MEMORIAL
AT THE SITE OF THE FUTURE MEMORIAL
AT THE SITE OF THE FUTURE MEMORIAL
Waiting for the American Spring
A Moratorium on Cartography
Tinder
Among Bloody Oracles
Self-Portrait as Poetry Defending Itself
Extermination
Landscaping
How to sleep
Citizen of—
How to destroy the body slowly (3)
The Exhibition of Autobiography
Kennel Light
No Goldblum, No Matter
How to endure the final hours
How to destroy the body slowly (4)
Self-Portrait of What Graces the Night
Blues
Nature Poem
All of Us (Who?)
Galaxies of Road
Meaning
As the Raven Flies
Great Waters Keep Moving Us
Heaven Is a Bad Name
In Order to Return
Acknowledgments
Boys with Their Pins Pulled
Call it what you will, this place,
like everywhere else beneath the sun,
burns. The boys spread through it
like fuel before the fire, torn khakis
muted in the dust kicked up by the fuss.
They are yelling or the earth is,
and the noise is flame.
The residents
always leave a residue. A spreading
stain, like these boys, if boys they are.
Everything has a name. Some are erased,
others misplaced, gifted and taken
little stacks of mapped bone,
they are kicking a ball while the men
search what used to be homes.
Shins
bruised, knees creaking, little bronze
busts gleaming, the ball bounces, if
ball it really is. Rejoice regardless,
someone is scoring a goal, though
the posts are always shifting and
so are the players, both the living
and the dead. Neither is winning,
despite the din,
the hammerblows
of this forge, making both boys
and grenades indistinguishable.
People scream—look out, duck,
and any thing might be sailing in
the air, a body or a ball or a blast.
Everything loses its form in the end.
A child, frenzied, falls. The others
surround him, a furious sandstorm.
In this nothing space,
you never know
what you’ll be bending to recover,
whether your fingers will meet skin,
plastic, or metal. No matter, the result
is always the same: a name erupting.
As the Bombed City Swells
(in a Viral Video)
And the streets become rivers of no
longer rushing water, wide and flat,
dark and calm, a wending mirror
of sky snakes its way between
each small building of mud brick
and stone. A man drifts
on a door
of a home or sheet of unclear metal,
his handmade keffiyeh chequered red
and white around his dusty head, a pole
in hand to convince the river to yield
in the only tongue it knows: urgency,
rhythmic and insistent, a language
of push pull give take.
Laughing, the man
and his new canoe explore the reborn
city, a desert wetness, even as others wade
through the hip-high liquid roads, collecting
debris, bemoaning the fate that scattered
pots and pans, children and names,
a past always floating just out of reach.
When will the burst dam be fixed, they say,
or is this the ocean’s angry work?
Fools,
the rootless man replies, look to the future—
do you not see the oasis has come to us,
do you not see me blooming here
like the rarest of flowers? Truly, the Arab
Spring has arrived.
Hanging Dry in Athens
Who set the sky on fire? all the children
ask, pointing little grubby fingers like guns
at the sculpted grey banks backlit by flame
or at least a sullen orange glare
as if a giant tulip is budding there
but when told so, none of them are fooled.
All their lives paper clouds have resisted
the sun, only now they appear to have caught on.
A hideous wind is brewing, carrying on it
the mewling of men, the acrid tang of teargas
and the first drifting motes of ash. Black snow!
Black snow! the younger boys cry, stomping
about with glee, momentarily forgetting
the ominous horizon glowering in the distance.
Later, from the safety of the hotel, I witness
the caramello sky unwrapping itself in a hurry
as a woman on a nearby rooftop gathers
laundry off a clothesline, her dress and hair
snatched and torn at, unpicking underwear,
the
n shorts, shirts, jackets, and skirts,
folding them all into a basket as if unaware
an arsonist has set everything ablaze or else,
at the very least, entirely unconcerned
by the ease with which we burn.
House of Beirut
for Mona El Hallak
Once, my ancestors would have been united—in name if nothing
else—knighted by the conqueror’s blade as Ottoman. Not Lebanese,
not Turkish. I cannot imagine the ease of being only one thing.
over a house where every bullet hole has been given a name,
a shrine to the violence that (r)ejected my family. Only in light
of this can you call it Paris, otherwise leave that imperial shade
alone. They say people are afraid to speak of the civil war lest
it spark back to life. The war is not taught. Who knew my family
have followed official policy for years? They will be devastated
to hear it. All my knowledge is myth-made, media-driven,
an inherited memory washed by a generation of tired hands.
It’s small now, so small, the colours faded and riddled
with perfect holes. I shake it out every day and lay it anew
over my chewed childhood as a cape or shroud but never
a flag.
This Is Not Meant for You
I tore this page from somebody else’s book.
It was written in Arabic so I found a man to lend
me his tongue. Left the page splotched with his thickness
& the following words: this was never meant
for you. Your grandfather made that choice & you live
with the ashes of it black on your teeth.
The Uber driver asked me where the local mosque was
real casual like he didn’t already know
I had it folded up in a square & carried it everywhere.
It was one of those nondescript places with a
plaque, the kind you need to get close to read
the inscription: this is not meant for you.
I tried once to swallow a prayerful palace
but got gum stuck on minarets—these stones
can’t be hidden in a body. Everyone knows
where they are. The driver releases me
onto Sydney Road, a replica of home,
all the Leb bread, smoke, & men. I try
not to see my father in them but he is there
no matter where I look, laughing
with the ease of a man never pierced
by a minaret. In each gaping mouth I witness
an old disaster, a rank tooth, a cavity
holding captive my name. I kneel
by the circle of my almost-fathers
not in worship but to listen to what they have
folded in their pockets: a language a sea
a boy never kissed a son never loved a
country that wasn’t meant for them
but which they carry everywhere.
On the Way to Sydney
Yellow fields ask too many questions for the sky
to answer. It refuses to lower itself
to what is knowable, a local geography
of facts. Occasionally it will rain
a torrent of dream, a world of water,
more than we need or the fields require.
I can’t keep any of it in. My hair gleams.
I am a child again spilling free in Lurnea,
an Arab boy among others, a boyhood of colours,
locust mouths descending on the mall,
heavy with need. Heavier with regret. Or
desire. One thing we never lacked
were questions, bruises. No copper
no security no mother could stump us—I
remember, I wasn’t at the scene of the crime
that’s not my name, this isn’t my house
or my country, I’m telling you I’m not even here
right now, I am somewhere else writing a poem.
It’s okay. I have what they call a photogenic memory.
It only retains beauty. Or else what it holds
is made beautiful given enough time.
Like my grandfather feasting on a snake’s head
to survive in war-born Lebanon. Like boys
in Coles stuffing pockets with stolen answers.
How to destroy the body slowly
Breathe deep the image
Of the burned body, the spilled
Viscera, the obvious cartilage.
Swallow all the dead children.
Feast your eyes on ruin,
The lunar landscapes of war:
Empty flags, cratered
Cities. Weigh down every last cell
With suffering, but not as Jesus did
In a single span of hours
Wracking flesh & blood, cross & nail,
Into godhood itself. A kind
Of regression. To be human, witness
Each act of woe & sin,
Then live with it
Knowing each blackened moment
Is taking root, is breaking
You. Every day for a hundred years
If you’re so lucky
Live with this ordinary
Divinity, live with this death as long as you can,
& waste not a single day on a rose.
Fridays in the Park
(or how to make a boy holy)
& i can’t help but notice his hips first, bumbag slung low, as the train doors open at Roxburgh Park. & i take in the trackies, his shadowed jaw, the slabs of concrete arcing over him. & as Arab boys are timeless or else stuck in time, i breathe easier in their pause, their familiar inescapable heat. & later, i spot him in the supermarket & know he knows i’m watching the way a shepherd tends his flock or the way the ocean shivers when the moon slides onto its back. & there is no significant body of water in the suburbs, nothing to drown in yet we drown anyway. & i take him in the long grass of the park, i taste him in the weeds, knees wet with mud, the night buzzing with the deaths of mosquitoes. the wild silence after, mouths heavy with musk, is complete & even the birds are mute with love in their nests. there is no song except our huffed breaths, the shuffle of grass bending beneath us, tickling skin, the whole world an animal gone quiet. i asked my aunty about the supernatural hush i felt & she said the animals stand still in holy awe, they know the Day of Judgment will fall on a Friday. & this is why neither of us made a sound, why his fingers bruised my lips to crush the gasping as one of us disappeared into the other, why the park bristled with jungle knowing, the kind with teeth, why it felt like the end of the world & the beginning, o the beginning of another.
Ameen
I am supposed to begin
with prayer. A snippet
of tongue. Bismillah. If
I am feeling Arab
I extend further
into r-rahmani r-rahim.
Sometimes that means
when I am most scared.
In the name of God the
Most Gracious, the Most
Merciful, I make my tea,
ease my soreness, prep
for sleep. How religious
I sound when in truth
it is one of the few phrases
I know as well as English.
In the grip of a nightmare
it is to Arabic I return
for solace. The scraps
I have left. It is enough
to awaken to sweat.
I fear repetition, t
hat
I might wear the sacred
out of language. Rub
the holy off my mouth.
What then will I face
the devil with in the dark?
Our shared loneliness.
Ask me to love him, I dare
you. I might. I know I must
not go with only this lark,
this irreverent song, spells
empty of heft—this speech
contains only myself, &
nothing of all the other
names God answers to.
How to be a son
My father was for the longest time
a plastic smile locked under the bed.
Before that, he was whatever came
out of my mother’s mouth. He was I’ll tell you
when you’re older. He was winding smoke,
a secret name. That fucking Turk.
He was foreign word, distant country.
I gave myself up to her hands which also
fathered; they shaped me into flinch.
Into hesitant crouch, expectant bruise.
Into locked door, CIA black site—
my body unknown and denied to any
but the basest men. I said beat my father
into me please, but he couldn’t be found.
And when he was, I wished he remained
lost. He blamed himself for the men I want.
A father can negate any need he thinks
they are the sum of all desires he thinks
absence has a gender. Listen.
You can’t backdate love, it destroys
history, which is all that I have & so
like any man, want to abandon.
In the absence of time I will invent
roses, a lineage beyond geography,
then all manner of gorgeous people
who rove in desert and olive grove,
in wet kingdoms, on the hunt for villages
where a boy can love a boy & still be
called son
Sailor’s Knot
There are only so many ways a son
can save his mother and I know none.
Hair trailing upward, body twisting
I watched her drown in air. Again.
I still blamed her for not making dinner.
Didn’t care for the floundering. Couldn’t
tie a sailor’s knot nor find a length of
rope. Now between us: borders,
a gulf of time. When I call—
but I don’t ever call—she says,
“My son, a lifetime of never submitting,
not to any man or god, yet the angels
I can feel them dancing on my skin.
Who’s laughing now?” It’s true, we all