Civil Fatigues, II
Brooklyn, 2024
Irreverent Cairo hymn, the chest
retracts unto subterranean ache, rummages up doctrines
of complaints from the unsuspecting digital buttons in my palm,
against the clueless stupid analog heart.
A woman from Egypt sings,
sculpts defiance for my forearms,
as I skin this disenfranchised poem–
a litany to protest. Sunday as Brooklyn naps,
the impervious clouds playing sweet in the startling blue, no sirens
adjudicating on the spiraling death ledgers
of the faraway coastlines we said were bayt.
In New York for the nth weekend of the genocide,
dusk now a list of wonderment
at why the stomach rumbles, still.
Often, in the immigrant rides home, the driver
knows your occupied past, as breaking updates
of other sorrow repeat on the radio
in between the crash stops of refuge.
In the strung out ennui of surviving,
we rely on plants from myriad habitats
for the ribs, for the stomach, for the smoke
in our curling Arabic dialects.
For this poem to happen, we must reverse engineer the breathing.
But in America, we buy boxes numbered,
colored, to collect many necessary new pills.
The coiled snake in our clavicle hibernates,
regardless of spring.
What is this continent of so few words between her people?
I stand guard against the sinking into shhhh.
A wreath of Palestinian idioms from childhood
swirls around the ceilings of this self.
Everywhere we lie, what fables your parents
taught you of liberation, stand.
Alert, at attention for the ongoing,
the incoming, the yet-to-arrive battles.
But, in the middle age of load bearing, the coverings seep.
Perhaps the veins must not electrify
as nails, perhaps the knuckles need a hand.
In the crescendo of wrath, the minute steps
we took to oblivion were invisible to our teachers.
Do you have twenty four hours of silence,
as we recite what a Palestinian has written of cruelty?
Newscast at the hour, every hour,
for as long as the weight of what all suffering is
can be numbered. No Palestinian child is child
for long, and in our breath, we brace
for the pummel, the digits struck, the stuck
records of war ridden possibilities,
the tactics creatively ruining soil, its bones,
its hair, its mangled spirits,
as your company boards erect barracks stacked
on graves, and announce it, anoint it holy.
No you do not, you do not
have twenty four hours
for the list of what a happy, blessed as fuck, Palestinian
such as I has known of the intricacy
of denial, the imminence of collective breaking.
Was it as far back as when they elected George Bush, again?
The ashen aura of my favorite film prof,
softly testing broadway midday, in the sunken glass
of that knowledge, the grey buzzing hiss of defeat in the stink,
so much so his bicycle walking past me drowned out the avenue, his
lips a ruler, the click of chains grating more than asphalt.
Shock and awe. Shock and fucking awe.
We listened to the screamers of no, in the squares of Union,
finished higher degrees as teeth drew fault lines in the snow.
Great set of pearly whites, my dentist once exclaimed.
You will keep them for life. But, for these cracks
in the enamel, please release your jaw to the
starlight, and sleep. The bones of you deserve more.
And still, we traversed oceans to tremble with you.
Every noon, we ground beans for the grinding.
We believed in the spoon flames of boiling, and reboiling, and sugar.
I hugged everyone who would let me– for the sheer slaking
of the desiccation in our breasts,
to enable the decision to routinely cook breakfast,
to wash our face before the meetings, to say howdy at the mall,
to sustain the eyelids for another late night cream routine,
widening the mouth for the tasks of the hour.
When they exploded a third of the arteries of Beirut,
we never went back,
no debris was cleared in this conscience.
Smoke, smoke, all your cigarettes laced hash,
and in this poison, codify the ledgers of the dead anew.
How petite they are, the shrouds of our making.
The glass of every Hamra window is festered in linings,
still jaggedly sewn in the discourse of hope.
Splinters of what lifelines I left there stalk the waistline,
no matter the ships we boarded to ignorant seas.
Every day I did not scream at the shambles of all matter
is a day on a costumed stage, in the great fake
dramaturgy of our resilience.
And through it, we kept pace, we lost Damascus,
muttered good morning, lusted tisba7 3ala alf kheir,
nchalla you all be blessed,
I hope this condolence note finds you.
Said, attached are the bank details,
shukran for the opportunity.
Paid all the bills, owed no one nothing.
Kept skipping, in the murky playgrounds
of any continent I could legally speak in. Woke up
yearly at dawn wondering where I last left the useless passports.
A refugee retains only papers as arsenal,
fragile to the detritus of space, of motion.
Do you ever tear the room apart in the lucidity of being
stateless, panicked at what green ID or blue document
was going to summon the living rooms of your father?
Perhaps you dropped the pages
in the latest exile you gifted yourself,
on the run from the heretic stories of neighbors bereaved.
Every time they killed a love of yours,
week after week for a century,
you sent sonnets to the ones who don’t.
The flowers of their fingers are intact.
You recognized that in the killing, there were spiders as matriarchs
weaving sanctuaries of grace known only to those
with eyes startled by the heat of your presence.
How we adored desperately
in the eras of poets whose tongues were hacked,
in the engines of hijacked planes,
in the envelopes of C4 on our pillows.
How we kept the notes, the receipts,
tatters of the blueprints of the valleys
where our grandparents kissed,
entwined under lemon blossoms, under merkavas.
We were constant in the leaving,
and the cities we abandoned burn rage in our wake,
no prayer for the scorch, no sacred oil on the temple.
A parade of mostly white men in suits delivered the verdicts.
We were guilty of much existence,
our music tormenting those who yelled
out the engagement orders from the hellfire above,
who signed the handshake
of menace, who advised the rotten king,
who poured cement into wells,
who shot my father’s dog at the very beginning.
Every time the named another village disappeared,
you drank fermented fruit to ward off this census.
You kept a chart of what you dared not think about,
out there on the trains, in fields of heather, in the nightclubs
of hasty sweat and you reapplied makeup.
And when alone, the interminable days unveiled epics.
The plot lines were celestial drawings
in the cave of the angry beast that hid in you.
The news outdid itself, compounded the hyperbole.
The statistics of the genocided grew, bit by creeping ivy bit.
Twelve murdered here, seventeen shot down there.
Five in secret, and one by mistake.
A school through misinformed coordinates,
a car at a metal gate too fast,
a boy with the wrong stutter at the door
of the wrong mosque.
The headlines were knives.
Every Palestinian year, a blonde braid by a rock.
Every winter, the rain in the breasts of grandmothers on the run.
We, who took to the books, remembered in our loneliness.
We knew the belly cramps unspoken,
the coughing in the insomnia of drones.
This annihilation by crumbs is an intimate marathon we train for.
We walk along the entrails bloodied in the grass,
and vow, there are bedrooms of ecstasy in our hips,
carnivals of our youth on balconies you can’t imagine.
We bent to the pruning of flowers,
caressed beards, slathered lavender.
Spoke the gibberish of God’s children cooing,
kissed each other harder.
We giggled in the afternoons of sisters like stories,
ululated at the weddings of men we called kindred.
The giggles of mothers were festivals of spice.
We learned what we could of unknown
grandfathers, held their portrait
as steel in the storms.
And, in every morning after, you got a job.
Then another, then another, and here you are.
A lengthy paper testifies to your determination.
You stayed up for the sunrise dances, you
listened in the classes, breathed moans
in the dark of lust to re-twirl
the earth to its natural spin.
All throughout, you sketched plans with those who
shared poems, in the aftershocks of phosphor.
And in the hours that have not yielded,
you flung wide doorways to guests,
took out the trash, washed blankets after the huddle.
In the swamp, you found tunnels of myrrh.
And we replied to the questions,
used the logic we were told appealed to your lawyers,
your printing presses, your pornographic televisions.
And we kept speaking up, and we kept speaking loud,
and did it with grace. Have you learned of our women’s power?
Perhaps what they don’t understand,
in this rancid government of mine here, is this:
The more you torture an entire nation together,
the more they are together.
Almost five decades later of rubble,
tents and resolutions, I no longer wish to be polite.
I doubt I ever really was, but here we are, in tatters.
What does all this take?
To have always kept stride,
in the full gore of dispossession?
To have always understood your place
in the ranked dimensions of privilege, of harbor.
To have detested our resilience,
even managing witness
far from the terror. How we said, enough
of the insistence on acquiescing
to the rigid demands of getting on with it,
with the inevitable day after.
I will mourn over a century if I so desire.
I question the purpose of healing,
here in the slaughterhouse.
I want to call forth the total lack of discretion. An untamed
reflex to the fate of our lovers. To tear at my garb,
unabashedly wail to the heavens, bring down
the sun on the shoulders
of those in the rooms of loss sequestering us.
To scream with no embarrassment until even
the moon arises to our grief. Pull at
the buttons popping, snatch rough the zippers,
rip off entire hemlines,
run naked in the order of things,
as politicians climb podiums of treachery,
as priests preach of tolerance and donations,
past the policemen picking their teeth,
past the sleaze of lawmakers denying justice for peace,
the tax accountants morphing numbers into munitions.
Maybe my curls will shred on the way,
I will be just skin, eyes leaking diesel.
Maybe my tongue will fork,
all the curses translating out,
burning craters where they land.
Maybe anyone touching me will turn to acid,
seeping into the annihilation of weeds.
But I will not terminate the sound,
stumbling in the alleys of mercy.
To lay unmoving in heaps of remembrance,
to unwind the clocks of sanity,
to not budge in the expulsion of reason.
To drop the armor it took to succeed at nothing,
to no longer smile at cameras
in the cacophony of opinions about you.
To empty the face entirely of flashbacks,
to cradle only incendiary ash in my gut.
Thud to knees in the absence of bone,
to collapse, to tumble,
to say I have no skeleton that will not bend.
Allow, then, your injured self to be held.
To be quelled in the holding.
Over and again nestled in the glimmer
of this world– wretched, pining, inconsolable.
And in the stark embrace of of still being here,
in the omnipresent baseline of flat,
in the mud of retinas that squelch Palestinian ache,
in this screech you did not know you had in you,
a nation might inscribe dictionaries in renewable blood.
It remains in the embers, for the wind to sign.
Can you feel it, lifted, explosive in the muted air?
A fire, perhaps, a blaze, yes, a flare.
*Bayt: Our Home
**Tisba7 3ala alf kheir: A Thousand Blessed Goodnights
***Nchalla: God Willing
****Shukran: Thank You
