knew she had a heart of gold. A pity,
my cousin said, it lies in a drug-fucked
woman. Sometimes I wake at night
choking on the rope I should have made
to save her. Maybe with every beating
she gave me warning
to flee a sinking ship. When she calls—
but she never calls, except for cash—
she says, “My son, the angels are burning
up like tiny candles, and the power’s out
so oh I shouldn’t enjoy it, but I can see now!”
I’m lying prostrate by the unmade table
in the kitchen, empty plates & knives
floating to the ceiling. Let us both linger
in the image of the record-keepers blazing,
every sin purified. Across the tripwire
lines of country, we sit in the dark
waiting for the call to come or
for a length of rope to unfurl.
Arabs in Space
My aunty arrived in Australia a little Lebanese
girl. She said it was still a time of milkmen
then, of creamy bottles left on doorsteps.
She was not bullied as she learned
English. She dropped out in Year 8
at thirteen years of age
so maybe she got lucky. If so, her belly
was swollen with fortune. An older Arab
boy—not by much but bad enough—
snatched the apples out of her mouth,
trampled all over her garden. Class
is no place for a mother, she learned.
He was a pimp with a stable of hookers
and a constant mother machine at home.
She gave him four kids before his heart
gave out. In life he was their conductor,
orchestrating joyful shrieks. In death
he moves in & out of their gaping
lips. Even cruel men are loved. Children
don’t know any better. I still don’t. Today
my aunty tells me, “You are not (Arab like)
us.” In Islam, in Lebanon, in Turkey,
in all my beginnings the mother is
erased, the earth destroyed by men
by machine by chance by design
& there are only the seeds of stars left
running from their own light
What It Is to Be Holy
after & for Kaveh
An Arab of his country and on his country once
said to a boy born in a colony: you too are Arab
I can hear it in your voice. We only knew
each other by what was pushed out.
He said: you have a psychological map,
a pure timeline of 400 years thankful
for family to draw on. I always knew I was ancient.
How else to explain being slowly destroyed,
left to mould in rooms, or being poured over
by people certain they knew what I meant?
He said: the holiest city in the world is quartered
and we can either blame Solomon for the idea
of carving lives in half or else all the plaintiffs
who refuse to love the whole enough.
I have taken to making my god flower
bramble, weed. Maybe to watch divinity
die or to make god observable, small, sweet
something to make honey from, never gospel.
Who was it that said you only write to the land
because the land cannot speak back?
They must not have been fluent in mountains
or an absence of certainty. I have prayed
every day in a language I know only in pieces.
No wonder I have centuries of faith locked
in my hair and nails so long, so matted.
Mattered. I keep doing that. Bleeding
belief, spilling it onto mats and garden beds.
Making love to whatever I consider holy:
the exiled light, the opening in everything,
what came before, spring, poets. Praise
be to God, Lord of all the worlds, even one
in which I am loved and let go.
How to destroy the body slowly (2)
An old white poet, after hearing this, said, “I found myself
Wondering: where is the redemption?”
As if this was a quality inherent to every life, as if it belonged
As if a poem can carry so much
As if the children, before having their foreheads cracked
Open didn’t desire an answer
To the question
As if I wasn’t desperate to have it waiting here
At the end of my tongue.
Breath
trying to inhale country / sinking & surrounded,
i am lodged like fishbone in a boy’s throat, the only
time i become a language, something sayable, tongued.
all around us, muscled farmland tenses flax & convenience
stores sell what we don’t have. // what does it say
about us that we call these red interiors “the country”?
where do the rest of us live / if not here. the vast
crumbling cement blocks / lit up with lifeless
lights are still joined at the hip to orchard
& crown, colonialism & cornerstone pub.
i
splash wild with desire / wherever i am allowed
pierced by the occasional kookaburra’s laugh, shrill
on the still, forged morning. // we children of elsewhere
secret ourselves, spilling into a deep ravine / the siren
sound of boys in love. // it resists our touch, the bush
burning as we lie / together, this country & i,
hardness to hardness, stone to bone / drawing a long
gleaming breath like a restless midnight river /
heavy and swollen / with the waterlogged
names of the dead
Birthday
i.
In the evening, my father mistook me
for his father’s country. It is the day
of the republic’s birth and thus yours,
he said. He was off by a month.
Neither of us could believe so small
a span of hours separated
a boy from a nation.
ii.
Mum manages the month, at least.
She crow-hops annually to another
number, asking, Is this it? Always
there are more numbers to be taloned.
Somewhere in the haze of her hashish
a child emerges clutching mountains.
iii.
The year of my birth birthed revolutions.
Eastern Europe convulsed. Walls opened.
A web sprawled under sea, spidered here.
I became me in the land that blew air
into my lungs, a country not of father
or mother. They cannot remember
where they do not belong.
iv.
How many times must one be born
before it is considered final? Poets know
not to mark the day. A thousand births
can take place in a year & a year
on some planets lasts a lifetime.
v.
Some days I wake up as Kafka waking
up as a man up as a son up as a bug
up as a country which, though changed
into some unrecognisable scurrying,
idles in the space it
grew up in
unable to leave and with no one
willing to kill it, or look it in the eye
or caress one of its long antennae.
Some days all I hear is the hateful buzz
of its sweet luminous wings.
vi.
I know the day my mother was born
but not the year. And nothing of the man
who thinks of me as his country.
Like any land I have been fought over
with some claiming to love me
more than others, some who are of me
and some who are invaders, new
comers. Those who brutalise my flesh
have also kissed it. Patriots, I suppose.
Everywhere patriots, everywhere
countries burning. I am scared to be
a country in this world.
vii.
Every river, every distant snow-
bound peak, every scraped sky
leans toward its unmaking.
With each gust of wind I grow
outward, dissolving the dirt,
picking borders apart.
Somewhere at the end of this
I will be born, a boy without edges.
Ordinary Things
I was out walking yesterday or perhaps it was today
when a man young as a son spoke under his breath: go
back home, he said, you belong. There, not here. Before
not now. This is not the first time, time was confused.
Tomorrow I go for a jog to let my slab of fat dance
and a woman pushing an empty pram stares,
imagining a past and a place of return I cannot.
I leave the suburbs, and the slithering hills
are nice until they realise I am ignorant
of their names; I am walking away
to the place I live in, and the sun is wetting
my hair, wildebeesting my body, adding weight
to every step. I shop in a convenience store
and the elderly owner nods to me, eyes filmed
over with where he used to be. His mouth
opens, throat bulging, and he ejects a red brick
small and perfectly formed. He says I will need it
some day. To build a bridge or a home? I ask, but
he doesn’t seem to think there is a difference.
I put the slick brick in my pocket. It is light as
the wind, heavy as a country. I return
to the house I grew up in and the house tells
there is no succour to be found in the past.
Outside, I see two men in love as a feature
of the landscape, their fingers reaching up
to tender sky. They spit into my hands red
sap I will need some day to mortar. I travel
into my flimsy chest, my lizard brain,
find a refrain of no and go and back and
land and man and home and beneath this
an echo of milk and brick, corn and breakfast,
you know, the ordinary things.
Factoids
My mother sits in a stone house and she burns.
Her father brought his family here to escape history.
When she was young, one of nine, he beat them
with his father’s hands. Later, high on heroin,
he became a midnight salesman, selling their jewels
and mattresses. I have no way to verify this.
My grandparents are both home in the mud.
A factoid can be a falsehood or a trivial truth,
it is a hole language allows to have two spirits.
My mother sits in a stone house and she burns.
Sometimes she is the stone, sometimes the flame.
She does not scream. She is a beaconI record
to use her light as a cudgel, to purple this page.
“I wanted to be an artist once. He wouldn’t let me.”
Her first husband beat her. He was high on heroin.
He hit her at home. Cracked her skull with a pistol.
Now she forgets her name at least once a day.
He visited her in the hospital as she lay recovering.
He beat her in that bed. I write everything down.
My mother sits in a stone house and she burns.
The house is a villa(ge) in Lebanon. The house is in Villa-
wood. There are photos of my mother before all this—
everyone agrees, she used to be beautiful.
I see her burning, her face and nose and lips curling
up into black paper as she does the dishes
and goes to work and orders takeaway dinner.
There is nothing more beautiful than survival
but I have no one to tell this to, everyone
agrees the present is an ugliness to be ignored.
My mother is not alone in her stone, her fiery
wedding dress. Other daughters go up next to her,
little infernos. They speak cinder and ash,
tongues a brand that sear language into body.
They tell me family has checkpoints vicious
as any country, and not everyone makes it
across or if they do, they lose their names
in a calligraphy ablaze. I wish I had asked
how to choose between a fist at home and
the border, between bruise and bewilderment,
or how to live in a place that is both safe
and wound. Flame and stone. Every word
has two spirits, at least. My mother survived,
and she did not. She can’t keep her dreams in,
they pour out the hole in her head a gun left,
a man left, life left—this poem left—open.
My mother sits in the stone house I put her in,
tell you of the diamond baked into her tooth.
How she made her smile a gem worth weighing.
I could say she never arrived from Lebanon.
That my grandfather let history burn
his body in Tripoli, and it saved us.
That she drives trucks, knows how to make gelato,
and is always dreaming up new inventions.
That her dogs make her squeal with joy.
Inside my stone house, these things seem trivial
or false, but I tell you they are true.
Chances
“I want to go my country.” My country wants to go
Me. Don’t go anywhere, my grandmother warns.
Her country is waiting. When she left it for this one,
Few Turks had gone so far. She slept on folded up
Blankets. “I no know English.” I know how
I misunderstand her sometimes
Purposefully. Then, everyone
Spoke with their bodies. She mastered
The low talk of the eyebrow, the lullaby of batted
Lash, the harsh frisson of hands open,
Clenched. Nobody bothered to learn her
Body. The nation
Skipped that lesson. Nothing to see her(e). “No
TV, no newspaper, no phone. I no have nothing,”
She says with envy. What a thing to gild
A tongue! She worked by day
In a factory, worked at home by night
First with her children, then their own.
“Yes,” she exclaims, “me when I working I love.
No nice sometimes, but nice.” She shrugs, & even
Her shrugs are historic. I sense a levelling
in them.
Everything in her world is 50-50. She is never
Happy, or angry or sad or living or dying. Always
She tells me, 50-50. I fit so easy in this splittage
I am giddy. There were many other
Migrants labouring
Beside her, all of them with a country
Waiting. Greek, Italian, Indo, Filipino, Spanish.
She prayed in the factory; the Muslims took shifts
To cover God. She never went uncovered. She lost
Two daughters, two sons, her husband of 53 years.
“Nine years ago
He go.” Their bed has emptied since.
She takes the couch, a long bench that fits only her.
Every visit I visit my ancestors. In her eyes Turkey
Sings in a way Erdogan could never imagine. She
Brings out photos of the dead. “Look, you look
Just like him. And him.” A hymn.
Every visit I visit myself
Only to shed him at the door. I invoke the past
When it suits. I fold it up to soften a hard bed.
Her apartment has a flat screen live-streaming
Turkish TV. Her mobile bides its time. The photos
Gather, multiply. “Now I have everything,” she says,
“God gives.” And the loss in her could make paintings
Weep. “But inside?” She shrugs. Her country is
Waiting, she says, and there is a 50-50 chance
She is right.
Instead, Memory
i.
I know a flower is not a weapon but the possibility
for harm remains. I’ve cut myself open on fields
looking for the borders I heard were waiting there.
I’ve cut open the fields looking for this
bludgeon I used to believe I could destroy
or wield to my own end. Now I only want to see the snakes
biting at my feet, to care for where I step. I worry
any act of extinction will warp the ecosystem. Surely
I am obliged to love what I cannot erase. My memories
ache for this to be true. They do not want to die.
Even my darkest knowing seeks the light
as a new kind of mother. I ask the light how
to behave. It should know, it has been around at least
the block touching gentle what can be touched
including, remarkably, me
the house, some trees. It kills nothing,
shepherding even the night to sleep
for a while. I envy what returns.
What might it feel like to save what I see? To bring
it back, through memory, unscathed. Instead,
whatever I alight upon becomes a violence: my boy
-hood featured three queens & a carousel of kingless