apology

Posted on December 5, 2019 by George Abraham

is the summer after my spleen almost ruptured into the stain of a thousand sunsets. i am sitting in a therapist’s office, and she asks me to start at the moment i wanted to die from my own hands. i could have painted her this body, in all its failed topologies; i haven’t a home that isn’t in love with the way it floods, but instead, i gave her a history lesson: 1967 – the west bank is annexed by israel after nakba, catastrophe, my grandparents, exile in their own home: when i say, anxiety stretches continents: when i say, depression is an ocean we never wanted to traverse: fast f or ward – my aunt falls in love with a woman twice her age; finds mother in her after her own grieved a stolen country, and decades of abuse from a father with rage in his blood; when she comes out, they ask if she needs to see a therapist; a nice woman to excise the devil in her – & today, a stranger with fists in his blood makes a growing country for my organs and i cannot love myself; or perhaps, this is just a topology lesson – a professor who fails me tells the class of exact sequences; of how topological spaces inherit the shape of their emptiness from previous generations of dimensions; a whole lineage of singularities, and at this point, i too wanted to disappear, in the office of this therapist, who was, perhaps, a topologist, who asks me so what shape does this anxiety take inside of you? & i wanted to say tooth of a mouth, eye of a hurricane in my chest, an organ with vast chambers, haunted by its own emptiness, and so much blood, it can almost be mistaken for a country; a newfound inheritance; an atheism found at the intersection of 3 merciless gods – do you pray still? why have you stopped praying? the therapist asks me & perhaps the therapist is my mother; the one who found god at the bottom of liquor bottles the color of bloodied oceans; the hands that prayed for a son who left in search for home; desire, swelling in him like a ruptured organ: father, forgive me my drunk inheritance/forgive the stairs that collapsed beneath the weight of me/forgive the third floor window that tried to swallow me into the night’s mouth/ for give the bodies i swallowed like broken teeth, the knees i spent trying to summon god in my own mouth/forgive the way my DNA strands are sculptors of brief suicides: i’m trying to love the shattered window of myself – the hands, the rocks, the broken religion left behind; my inheritance, this body of vandalized cathedrals: light me on fire; strip my god from my breath; watch as i dance dancing amidst the flames

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Elegy on Plastic Kazoo

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Peter Twal

after Dean Young, for Drew

So many things in this life are unlike themselves
in cartoons, but it took me finding
a scorpion in Theodore’s bathtub
to admit it. I didn’t ask if
there was blood, a limb still
sweet from a dog’s love when they found
you. I was 11,315 days old
when I wrote this, and now I’m not
certain twigs make the best kindle for a campfire
when we’re already so many extra
cells. If I consider
myself a house of hair dressing
a home of bone, skin seems less
nonsensical. Doctors told me
Theodore was born with a stomach
no more than a marble, eyelid
thin, facts for which I was ill-
prepared so all night, I read to him
about rare metals, even rarer
exoskeletons. The Velvet
Ant, the Bird Mite. The Bark
Scorpion hardly moved when I crushed it
with the tip of a broomstick, its pop like a twig
bowing to a flame. Two days later, I mistook
a tick for an ingrown hair, and let it be. I found a friend
in a mirror once and understood differently
what it is to be eye-level with anything.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Journey

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Lisa Suhair Majaj

Already you’re walking down the road alone,
though you insist you can still turn back.

You’d rather not hear our grief-song,
so we offer silence, the one gift still possible.

Your body was the oldest home you ever knew.
Stalwart and reliable, it bore you across continents.

Now flesh proves traitorous, dead skin
sloughing like bark from a rotting tree—

though at the core, the wood still lives.
Don’t tell us what you see ahead.

Speak your way back to the beginning,
when it was still morning, and light undulated

off springtime fields like a promise.
You didn’t know then what roads you would travel.

You were young, and eager, and ready for life.
There was still so much time.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Ramadan, 1979

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Majda Gama

Barely old enough to fast, my father
agreed to half-a-day with water.
In the morning I put on my slippers
& moved with the rhythm of our households:
a little mimic to the adults who woke to pray.
The azhan in Alexandria was worth flinging
windows open to & drinking in while
sitting on a plastic chair on our balakona.
Worth turning ABBA off so that the voice
of the muezzin could be heard over modern noise.
I watched the Mediterranean Sea & said
its other name. I heard my name given a new
syllable. I sipped water on the morning
of the first day of the holy month
while the crescent pearled on the horizon.
I lived again on the Hijrah calendar.
It was a revolutionary year. I turned seven.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

luv poem 2 (while listening to lady lamb)

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Jess Rizkallah

i like driving around at night and being in luv w/you
one hand on the wheel the other on my neck
god what’s wrong with me all i fantasize about
is us at night taking turns, windows down one driving while the other–
speaking of hands i stare at them all day their roads their fates i write them
i still can’t draw them. mathematically speaking this relates
to my inability to fold a map back up the way mapmakers intended.
life hack: when you give in and fold the paper in half, point A
touches point B. suddenly our cities are not so far apart.
i want to take the backroads to you. like the ones i take
to get to rt. 28, which is the mass ave of my life now. i can’t help
but compare everything in my life to something else i felt before it, hollowing it
new then climbing inside to sing my old songs. i’m trapping myself
inside echoes. but i’m learning to keep quiet in the new stillnesses until i mirage
through the fade. til the new shines through. @joshcornillon tweeted nostalgia is poison
and that’s my hot take!! stop wanting things back!! want new things!!
and like RT but you return like a planet everyone warns about
i never see you coming and we don’t believe
in linearity so nothing is retrograde if we decide it isn’t. i want to say
i’ve never felt this way before and mostly i haven’t
but ok listen the first time i heard your name, it wasn’t yours yet
it belonged to a friend of my father’s. an old name.
i was six years old and it struck me. i repeated it
to myself over and over while i played with legos.
my dad’s friend’s daughter didn’t think anything of it
just kept handing me legos. isn’t that so weird and funny.
it’s like i knew you were important before i even knew you
it’s like the world around me was like “yeah basically” it’s like
something was going 60 on a backroad to cut time in half
to fold time in on itself point you meeting point me. anyway
i just remembered all this on tyler st and wanted
to tell you.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Fish in Bushwick

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Kamelya Youssef

Today, today is all of time. Mahmoud Darwish

I trained my hand to do it without the eye.
In my palm held the flesh, felt the shrimp’s small sinews fall
to pieces in the sink, my fingers slick and the smell
of fish the smallest sound in this kitchen in Bushwick.
After a few fumbled tries, I gentle cut open the intestines, dozens of them
careful to keep the shit contained.

In between is a place, I said to Akram’s surprise,
and the words gave flesh to a familiar feeling.
In the silent moments of our night, he said it again and again
to ensure that the waning hours of night had not melted
away the buttered truth of an untrue thing. I have always been
only in-between. A small medium between countries and ways of saying
showerhead, deposit, three pounds of porgy, lightbulb.

I wonder what rawness has affected in how we see death,
a stage before consumption before the cooking of
a flesh to our body’s liking. He slid his finger into the
underbelly of the fish the butcher had cleaned with
wide leathered hands, a pinked knife clipping off the
scales in rows, iridescent waste plop upon cellophane. We
stuffed the belly of each fish with chopped aromatics,
garlic, jalepeño, cilantro, lemon, like his mother would be doing
in her kitchen in Gaza upon returning from the fish market,
selecting from what lay on the pillows of ice, keeping
watch for the fresh ones without blood in their unflinching eye.

We smoked cigarettes in Akram’s kitchen. His roommate’s
live-in girlfriend of two weeks watched us dance to
mahragan songs on YouTube, smoked with us while she did
the dishes and outside it rained. Multiple things are always
happening at once. We were new to each other, met a night on Second Ave and
settled into a stranger’s conversation for three days for fear of being
again lost to the mouth of this voracious city. I have not seen him since.

Then I had become a collector of my own memories, made
home in a plastic box of toiletries and a small shrine to my friends.
In between belongings, I become a museum of myself.
Akram said he left everything behind and did not turn back
to remember because the past is far away and there are
some impossible returns that float around the city like ghosts
haunting where they never were able to leave. Some
places are not memories or metaphors. They cannot be
captured in the net of thought or language or a thing you put in a box
or tuck into your flesh. Some places become metaphors
the further away we get.

I hunger for a memory flayed and ageing and it begins to stink,
looks up at me with a tiny blood in its unflinching eye, threatens
to become more raw and rotten by the second, indifferent to whether
I cook it delicious in time.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Dream Where I find My Roof

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Diane DeCillis

I dream it, the dream my yearning self
sleeps for. I’m at my own

birthday party celebrating with
all the father figures I have known—

the nurturers who’ve made me feel loved,
and my true father, Uppo who haunted me

with his absence. They file in hand-in-hand—
black tuxedos, white shirts, bowties,

a few, those who taught me to be reckless,
buttons undone, ties loosened—

ready to take the floor for the dabke,
line dance born of Lebanese villagers

gathered on housetops with drums
and ouds—music to stomp straw,

mud, branches into sturdy roofs—
protection from the volatile sky.

As other guests arrive, I turn
to greet them—just long enough

that when I look back, the men are gone!—
before I could tell them

though their presence blessed me with sheltering
hours—there was Sittu, always Sittu

who viewed this granddaughter with eyes
sharp as bee stings, her words, termites

gnawing through my roof. How even so, I clung
to her apron to learn the language of sustenance,

having already learned the language of hunger.
I would tell you how it felt to only imagine you,

how the night sky opened its inviting buffet of stars
that never drew close enough to feed me.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

A Palestinian Seeks Therapy

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Lina AlSharif

I want to say israel made me lose everything to history I had no hand in
I was born brown to a family that picked oranges not fights



I want to say I am here in my body but I am still
trying to pull it from under rubble trying to bring it to life


I want to say israel occupies the space between me and my breath

the milk I breastfeed to my babies, the water I give to jasmines, the dreams I build

I want to say I am angry grieving and I don’t know which is which

and I want to hear these words: “your feelings are valid”



I want to ask how I can end this? I still fear the night skies tuning colors

I still see the shadows of their rifles; every barbwire is a border, every firework is a bomb

I want to say I love myself. I love us

circling in dance rowing in prayer fisting in a battle baking bread

I want to say I am capable of hope and healing
and I quote Darwish:” سيطلع من عتمتي قمر”



But I say:” I have trouble sleeping”
you end the session and give the prescription.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Eminent Domain Tanka

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Deema Shehabi

Said her husband once
of her eyes fed to the cats
why weep at the sight

of small, outstretched hands, my love
morning we’ll go South

*

Fleeing, too late, bodies
crash, necks snapped on the clean sill
brief fleshy light—

Victor Jarra’s hands
ripped, ligaments flung like song.

*

River, rows of blackberries
decorate lips, beard, cheekbones.
August snaps done, lost.

Who leaves now becomes
homeless, hawks fly; crows descend.

*

What hides tiny snakes
in the holes of its dark walls:
the Damascene house—

Bassamat’s face spells
home, her tongue’s tip on fire.

*

On a woman’s face
a rust blemish lit up by
a surveillance flare—

Shut-up now, Marie.
They are closing in quickly.

*

Child by the Sahel
lighting through acacias
just lucid dreaming.

He wakes up angry,
devours a memory—

*

Night: old lady scrapes
the light in the mustard field,
just to scare the trees

Outside the big house,
a father scalps his lawn down—

*

Hummingbird returns,
hears Milosz read “A Song on
the End of the World”—

She hangs clothes outside,
smells fire in the air, sighs—

*

Rain, gooseberries, heart-
beat—she conjures Dickinson
knocks her heart down, sighs:

this love hurts badly
Return before it’s too late.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Looking for Shade in Beirut

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Ahmad Almallah

*
corrupt and corrupting I proceed
like a chant upon a hill, I decorate:

my days with more days

oh dreams do not wake, shut
eyes!

oh how the air can create

how the hours blend, all

gone!

at once I see, and at
all
there is nothing
to be seen.


*
here
an old ache I hold, in one
corner
of this chipped bone,
something breaks and the pain
begins and begs
like
a slow sluggish snail
it begs
a start

that never never ends.


*
so I witness and wait,
and I wait and wait
to witness:

some more, I raise my head
to the blue,
to the clouds:
see there!
the old and the new, how
time can pass us all, how
these walls of old wars
have not been hidden:

oh what giant and
mad bird has been
pecking
at this city?


*
sigh after sigh, this is the place
of far-fetched emptiness
of narrow side-walks
that have no room for
the steps—

the ones demanding
and
constant.


*
on the streets the beggars beg
they always extend:

I imagine and decline, the hands
no longer matter
no longer
can one count or account:

we pass figures how many

millions?

all sent to this corner
of hunger.


*
a marred and martyred language
no one speaks here

we all exchange

views

I am beside myself of course, but
hear…
hear me imitate
all others

oh—

the figures we avoid are at once
and at all

us.


*
when can this deranged
tongue

when will
it
cry?

when will it sustain?
will it
ever
grant me life or
death?

will it ever
grant me choice or
dime?

I can flip my luck like dawn
I can drown it among the fish
but I have no length for life:
I’m ashamed, I

myself

trying to situate—

but instead
I evade
into my own invention of space
as things pile up:
here nothing
gets tossed or thrown—

the blood of martyrs and
murderers
all the same!

all preserved and reserved
for the hour and the next
and the one preceding
all.


*
the tireless tires of this city
the stuff for flames
the creators of dark fumes
the setters of gloom
I see them now—
here and there
buried in the boil maybe
fed up:
and yes
fed to the soil.

and these screens
filling…

how they make us
all avoid
the things on the ground

a heaven,
this is hell!
a heaven,
we propel:

our steps
avoiding litter,
avoiding imitations
and all

creations—

people drop
like flies, they want to speak
make sounds

ashes on ash:
a body is murdered every hour:
And if only
I could—
shame these days with color.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

antigone 4

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Fargo Tbakhi

for peter twal

when elephants mourn their dead, they do it quiet.
no sound, just puffs of air from tender trunks
that nuzzle fallen tusks and lower jaws.
the pillars of their legs shuffling around
those great grey faces. antigone wants
to be an elephant most of the time.
this world has grave enough for elephants.

we’d blow soft air through what trunks we have,
hold our wailing in, make silence blue.
elephant funerals draw no snipers. they’ll mistake
our grief for wind. perhaps our bodies shake
the ground, perhaps our hides are weathered, too.
we’ll make an earthquake when we fall.
they can kill us all, antigone, but then we’ll be dirt dreams.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Losing It

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Jessica Abughattas

When I lost it—tipsy from stolen beers
in a red VW bus parked on a suburban street, 19—
it wasn’t to my boyfriend. No, it wasn’t
to that good-boy baseball player.
Even though he had been waiting for a year.
Even though we would get back together
that fall and he would never know,
and he would think
he was the one. The taker
didn’t even know there was anything
to take. It was the last day of the summer
we spent holding hands in malls
for air conditioning, suggesting
but never actually seeing any movies,
sharing tall sodas, studying for summer classes:
the poet and the scientist, a dichotomy
I found strangely comforting, as if
I would be safe in the hands of this future
doctor, whose phone call I awaited
each night. Not-His-Real-Dad paid cash
for every VW he restored to be resold
to hobbyists. I too felt polished, pristine.
I was the prize rising out of the front seat
in white short shorts and Italian sunglasses.
He had worked on me all summer, and I
was ready, maybe. Maybe I thought
he deserved it, for all he’d gone through.
Maybe I liked it when he tapped
Not-Dad’s shoulder that afternoon at the pool
and disappeared inside to talk.
When they returned, we had two options:
Dad said you could sleep over,
in the house in separate rooms, or
in the bus…we could sleep together.
And just like that, my sex
had been negotiated,
certified and certainly happening.
With beers swiped from the garage fridge, we mounted
the red bus, with its red carpet and red curtains
and red sheets on the mattress, never slept in.
I didn’t bleed. At first, it kinda hurts, I said.
Then suddenly it didn’t, and we were
on the road, set
on drifting far in opposite directions.
When we finished, he poured water
in the rubber to check for leaks.
We couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.
Maybe that’s why I waited. How my friends
will get a kick out of this someday,
when I can tell it without shame.
And I swear, I’d tell them
I never felt more like a woman
than months later when I saw this picture:
Him, with another girl from our school
posed in front of the red bus, parked on the PCH.
His hand poised on her shoulder, her big hair
wild from the sea. And I knew exactly
what he would do with her later that night—
How the thing worked, oh, how it tasted.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Years we lived close to the bone

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Ruth Awad

When the dog died, I woke up with a mouth
full of fur. I think she would get a kick out of that
but it takes hours to will myself from bed.
More to endure the morning, to not
fill her bowl or carry her to the yard
where she’d muster a few three-legged steps
before plopping down, exhausted, and I’d lift
her to my shoulder, her big disappointed eyes like,
Can you believe this shit?

The way our bodies just give up?

She is more than just an animal.
How do I tell you I held her every day
of her life, that caring for one small dog
made me live when I didn’t want to live?
I listen now for her scold of a bark,
follow the sound, follow the sound
into another day and do it all over again.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Like Smoke Does

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Threa Almontaser

Ama, speak Arabic, please, I still understand it. No, America
didn’t make me forget, like it forgets my name. / It’s fine there,

except people keep asking to see my hair. He can make his own plate,
knows the names / of spices, has two hands, is sitting right there. I don’t always

talk about equality. I talk about school, my garden, what I’ll name /
these poems. Remember the fire last year? Grass still won’t grow

where the grenade hit. We knew there’d be no rescue — all the lambs
loose, a white stream emerging from the smoke cloud, directionless, with nothing

but their names. / Call my mother, Umm Threa — I’m firstborn.
Yes, he’s the first son, but my name / still matters. Yes, here I go again.

Do I tire you? Do you remember when I hadn’t yet been taught my two syllables,
head shaved, called Child, Little One, in an uncle’s hand-me-downs,

sexless as a mispronounced name? / Don’t deny it. We recognize women
through the men: Umm, mother of Ahmed. Bint, daughter of Ali —

their birth names / abandoned, an existence overlapped by his.
To strip down your own name / and fold it back together

is a kind of war. I dreamt of shouting it into a cave. Each letter was fed
to fatness and something was built bearing my name / after the echo died.

What Eve must have felt when Adam went ahead and named / all the animals
before she was even created. I feel it now whenever a mother

is named / for the son she births, a father by who he possesses.
A name / should be the sound we are found in. I learned early what God

likes to be called, swished a hundred names / around my mouth to taste
but my own. The other day someone’s cousin was patted down

by police, a Muslim death the news won’t cover. Maybe because
he had a name / like Abdullah, they’ll reverse the story, say he

pulled the trigger. I touch my forehead to brown earth, whisper
our names, / pray the ground cracks open this time. Yes, Ama,

would you believe our name / in America is a fish-hook, each vowel
like pulling glass from their tongues, trying not to get cut.

I wanted a name / that glided on gums, wouldn’t hit the back of teeth
with a rattle, no hitch on the voice box, please. I announced

myself and the sound arrived roiled and muddy like river silt
stirred up. The white kids laughed harder, rubbing their own names /

on each other, snakes polishing their scales. Even the wind in this country
can’t say it right, howling my name / like a throat mid-gurgle. I drank down

Jane’s and Emily’s as a whirlpool sucks waves, went home saying,
Call me Susie. I longed for a name / that left the lips readily.

One that could kiss and be kissed, one of tailored lawns, backyard pools,
lemonade stands. Now I tell them, If you can say Tchaikovsky,

you can say Threa. Yes, I remember my full name / — all ten
from my dad and the men before him. I recite them together.

They press against mine like bodies on a full boat, lost
between the Mahmood’s and Mohamed’s. Do names / exist the same

after translation? Do they thin-out like smoke does when it trails
up, past high branches and all the names / sung in trees? Threa drifting.

Threa as lone, gray wisp scattered by the wind,

until even the sky forgets

it was ever there.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Substitute

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Glenn Shaheen

Think about reason – bonk bonk. Well, at least let me tell you
about biography – bonk. My heaven is slight, eager to appear,
a lung full. I love my friends and some days I hate them, spirits
suddenly replaced in the night like the great changeling
of folklore. A week and I could make them pay for this. In a
Yankee state all of the citizens lilt their heads upward at certain
sounds, for certain parts of speech or syntax. They take pride
in it being a Yankee state, claim they’ve erased racism, yet
the schools still load honors classes with idiot white kids, white
teachers still say Detroit and Chicago are “dirty, dirty places.”
One school has an emergency plan for every possible contingency,
including nuclear attack, dirty bomb attack, biological weapon
attack, and stranger on campus. Determine what the stranger’s
nationality is, first, says the book. The principals, when I sub,
ask me where I’m from and look disappointed when I say
Canada. Sure I know what they meant but fuck em! Where are
they from? Bradenton? Aidenton? Thomsonton? My friends,
they’re nice people who would support me at a moment’s notice.
My heaven, it’s just silence, ice, and dark. Some of my friends
believe my successes were helped by my a) name b) “olive skin”
c) nationality of certain members of my family who are strangers
to me or d) all of the above. Those friends, they are close friends,
and some only think this from afar. The car, it needs another
expensive procedure. It has a taste for blood. I wish it to be
crushed at night by a tree branch, something quick and non-
injurious. Car heaven, is that dark too? Next to, I imagine,
cat heaven. All the heavens adjacent but I want them empty if real.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Porch Haiku

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hayan Charara

On the porch
the men argue,
the cat sleeps.


On the porch—
we shut up for a minute
to hear cicadas.


On the porch
listening to the radio—
no survivors.


On the porch
I watch a dog
eat from the trash.


On the porch
the ashtray fills up
with rain.

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Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged ,

Love Under Capitalism

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Omar Sakr

The new joint around the corner keeps
changing its name. I get it. I am afraid
of growing old. I can’t afford this face
for long, this place for long. I still invite
people in. The barista wants to know
me. I want to trust his intentions, his sup
as I sip at what he just made and feel
a little more alive. I shiver at the usual
delivered by so many smiles. His dimples.
Large cap? Desire hissing. Four forty five.
It feels wrong to say don’t ask me
to be human. This is a transaction only.
I need to preside over when I am more
than money moving between machines.
That’s what all of this comes down to:
this is not my first coffee of the day &
won’t be my last. I rub my hand over
the silver band of my fade and imagine
it as his, as a distance closed, as a tug
at my trackies. He needs to be talking.
To be more than a service. A silence.
The cost of this moment is greater
than either of us knows or cares to
think about for the other. The radio
squawks: there’s been another attack.
A crack tears through the small café.
I take what I have ordered and leave
with what I need: no expectation
of a return.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

A Refugee Grows Old

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zeina Azzam

for my mother

She is surprised by the pink cyclamen
in the pot, examines the foreign

petals, upswept as if reaching toward
another place. Her own journey seems muted now,

details as far away as her childhood in Palestine.
Where in one scenario she would have lived

in the same place until great grandchildren
played around the lemon tree that defined

her family’s house in scent and space.
Where in the real scenario

she fled for her life with a husband and baby,
in her pocket a key that rusted over the years.

Her memories are like henna on a hand,
splendid arabesques fading each day

until gone. She has covered so many miles
by boat, plane, car, on foot, measured

by oceans and clouds, gas fumes,
tattered flags left behind, driver’s licenses,

rental agreements, goodbyes to friends and family,
a lifetime unanchored, cleaved.

She continues to worry someone
is plotting to take away her home

while slowly hunching over, a downswept
bent flower weighed down by hallucinations.

She knows some things never leave you
so you have to leave them yourself,

takes small steps away
looking for some peace.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Skyping My Mother

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Philip Metres

Your fin-quick gaze
now swims into view, ex-convent eyes
long uncloistered:

a mother’s face is a lifetime
of faces, voluminously lined and luminous,
now distracted by this

real time letter. Each flourish
of your hand blurs its swish, the back
wash of bytes.

I’ve spent a life emerging
from my image of you, and now you’ve gone
amniotic. We were born

to each other, mother
and first child—our heartpumps that rhumba
when thrilled or exhausted,

lungs that seize in cold,
backs we throw out, lock us in bed for days.
In a failed poem, I once wrote

if the sky were a voice, it would
be yours. The years rub it to a fluted rasp,
raspier over the audio

of compressed memory.
My daughters—reason for this spectral
reunion—crowd the screen,

invisible bits of you
coiled in them, their binary pool
of ancestral light.


When we watch your eyes,
we see you looking down to where we must be
looking on your screen,

a frame below the frame of us
looking down to you. As if a picture turns out
to be a window—

though we’re locked inside
our distant homes, and the window itself
is what’s raining.

Something in us
loves this earth, this flesh, but not enough
to cease our flailing

against its faithful
magnetic pull. Only a day’s drive away, too far
to feel this close.

Wordsworth-worshipper,
you always read my mind, nerve networks
open as web pages.

Today, the headline—
“A mission to the moon with no return
in mind.” We’re digital

immigrants exiled
from taste of your breath, the hum your lungs
thrum when you’re happy

to see us, the bird
-quick movement of you in the room,
and the room in you.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

To Grieve for All Your Other Selves

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Lena Tuffaha

A golden shovel after Marwa Helal

Rationing cumin and sumac when
the last of summer’s reinforcements dwindle, you
offer us soup and unadorned fattoush at maghreb. Your hands move

with practiced grace, slicing radishes, stirring lentils around,
but the meal is mere facsimile, no trace of childhood or home, as
featureless as we felt on our first Ramadan here. Much

of what passes for memory is just hunger, taste buds posing as
spurned lovers. My body is revolting against what I
always assumed would feed me—I no longer have

a lexis for these transformations. What keeps you
loyal to your meticulous rituals? Is it too late to learn
to recite the words without translating them? Sometimes

my single prayer is for forgetting. Given the blade, I would excise the
verbs and the scar tissue that separate us—the emptiest
of all accomplishments is language mastery in the new world, a thing

of kaleidoscopic allure and little return on investment. It is
passport without passage. And do we ever pass in an
unaccustomed landscape? We’re given away by the overstuffed

filing cabinets, the crumbling certainties of ancestry, the ever-present suitcase.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

love poem for the newly out

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zeyn Joukhadar

I dream a man I used
to love knifes clean
through the flesh of my name
out springs an orange dress
blood & kohl
he conjures my hair
it unfurls from the root
like a planted flag
 
sometimes my body fails
to revert to vessel
in these dreams
I become something else
something without edges
the point at which my forehead
touches the earth
or the unseen fist of gravity
bending light
 
sometimes I wake
before he drowns me
beneath the ocean
of his body
 
I kick myself toward the light
re-inhabit each nerve
each egg ripe
as a ruined palace
in the desert of my belly

my scars reinvent their knit ridges
& I am still made
of my own flesh
I unswallow the blade
from my own throat
tongue the clot of my name
in my mouth
smooth as a new tooth

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

salat the morning after a terrorist attack

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Dujie Tahat

—for the 50 Muslims killed in Christchurch, New Zealand during Ju’mah on March 15, 2019

[adhan]

My littlest’s small hands ask if I’m okay
this holy Friday. The alarm, and, minutes after, still
looking up into the square light
of my phone:

I’m weeping.

[standing]

On the train ride to the airport,
my ex wife calls to say, Good news:

No cancer.

and I’m weeping all over
myself again.

No one
seems to notice.

[bowing]

There’s a baby in a stroller
so I burst into tears.

Another’s beloved’s perfect shoulder. A child on an escalator.

TSA
asks if there are liquids
in my bag and I burst

into tears —sorry—I mean I’m weeping, ma’am. Rifling

through my carry-on, my contact lens solution hits the floor,
and I’m sorry
—I’m sorry—

I’m trying to put all this

water back into my eyes.

[prostration]

I count up to fifty
people on the plane,

and several are afraid
we’re going to die.

I want to tell them:
We’re all gonna die.

[prostration again]

I’m a stranger in California. I search
for the closest mosque by listening
for the weeping.

The sermon:

We’re all gonna die
and it’s a beautiful thing.
May Allah
make the angels at the time of your death ones of mercy.

Are we prepared to face allah subhanahu wa ta3alah?

[sitting]

I touch my people’s knees.
I grace my people’s elbows.
I hold my people’s hands.
My people. My people. My people.

May allah subhannalah accept them.

[salam alaikum]

I say to my perfect Santa Clara strangers:

Thank you, brother.

Thank you, sister.

And I never meant it more in my life. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

All Summer, I Waited For Frank

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hazem Fahmy

Speeding across Brooklyn on a hot July afternoon in Hanane’s car, Yasmin tells me about Harper Lee, how she had been reclusive and almost never questioned for it. She tells me this because an Atlantic article was just published, comparing the novelist to who but Frank Ocean, citing the time it took them from project to project; a fascinating similarity. Later, my feet in the sand, Adam shows me the memes:

#WaitingforFrank
#WheresTheAlbumFrank

We laugh as we get high on the beach, making do with what’s been given to us.
***
On a hotter July night, I wait for the subway with George and Julian and we talk about disappearing, how heavy that sweet impatience wore on our backs.
***
I think I waited so long for Frank because I came out of Ramadan with tired ears. I needed a prophetic rhapsody, some soft muscle for my aching memory, green hair for my body to grow in.
***
Before he leaves the city, Marcelo throws a going away party and invites me. On the Facebook event, he promises they will have different people on shifts, just waiting for the album to drop. This is August, so he feels lucky. I never made it up to Yonkers. I don’t know if this actually happened. I spent that night with Misho, planning what little time we were about to have in Cairo. This is joy, this is summer.

#WheresTheAlbumFrank

***
I woke up on a Thursday in Cairo and by the grace of God the album was just there on my phone. Mama told me to pack because we were leaving soon, but I stayed in bed, headphones in. I wanted to dance, not celebrate per se, but dance. My body had always trusted itself with Frank, at least more than it did with me. My father came in to remind me that we had to leave soon, so I paused the album for later, only to realize there were not that many songs I could really dance to.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Ticker

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Fady Joudah

I love my car. Old shoes
aren’t good for my knees and hips.
Two things in life
on which one shouldn’t skimp:
vehicles for feet
and vessels of spine—
he who sleeps well walks well,
but my old car hurts me none.
A reliability to run
capital out of business,
workers out of factories,
(though not in the manner
robots might), and out of crises,
our middle lives. After 100,000 miles,
my car won’t hear me say
“You don’t need to keep going
until you’re 120. I’m not afraid
to let you, irreplaceable, go.”
My car’s a sage,
has signed a do-not-resuscitate.

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