Or the things I’d rather write about like…


I. How in Newtown today I paid $22 for a small tub of tabbouleh… and pronounced it ‘tabouly’

II. How thin eyebrows are making a comeback. They should have stayed in the 90s along with the rise of blond boy bands and daytime talk shows (Jerry, Maury, Sally…).
And those ‘boycott halal’ lists? I want to thank them for doing us a solid.

III. How I only know how to drive in Arabic curses…And let’s be honest, Egyptian molokhiye is the one to rule them all. And that whistling: Out Loud. In. Public. is truly unhinged behaviour. IV So is unpacking your bag right after a long flight (every household has one).

IV. I want to write a love poem to the ancestors, first to my grandmother, reassure her that, yes, eventually, I do get married and Teta, you were wrong, because I still don’t cook.

V. My four cats, and how I swear, I swear, each one of them has their own unique personality. My cats are special. And yes, I’d love to show you photos, I thought you’d never ask
How my landlord hiked up the rent…He says, his hands are tied – it’s hard paying mortgage on multiple properties. I sympathise.

VI. Forget thigh gaps. I want an ode to thick thighs. Thighs that rub and chafe, that stretch out jeans and quake the dance floor, thighs you comfortably curl up in, that jog and squat and strike and hold us up with power and pride.

VII. I want to write about Well-meaning White Women™ on NGO boards, and that Julia and Hilary and Kamala are betrayals to feminism, not beacons of it.

VIII. How Mr Big was definitely toxic, how it’s pickles on a burger every time and Team Kendrick over Drake… But also, why is mainstream media obsessed with pitting us racialised artists against each other?

IX. A defence of glamping: a. because you don’t need to worry about plumbing;
b. nor do you need to choose between ‘men or bears’: neither is actually an option.

X. I want to write about my endometriosis, how my doctor said, ‘not to worry about it’ and to ‘put up with the pain’ for five years straight (yes, he is a man). How underfunded it is, how the average time it used to take to diagnose endometriosis in this country was over 12 years (if it affected men, they’d have found a cure).

XI. I want to write about starfish, about crisp, high thread count bed sheets, about rain and rooftoops and roadtrips, and fortune tellers on tiktok and Mariah’s 7 octave range and skincare routines and that single ripe grape, the life-changing Notes app.

XII. Honestly…There are so many things I want to write about, that I’d rather write about.

———————

I. What are words when I’ve never seen so many organs spill onto my screen, into my palm?

II. How does one write about hospital-shaped graveyards? Are bulldozers meant to crush bone?

III. Joseline Hernandez in Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document: “What the fuck. Can I live? Can I live?
Can I fucking live?”

IV. Who does this limb belong to?

V. How do you reassemble ripped, shredded, mutilated bodies? How do you count the dead, let alone identify them?

VI. Micaela reminds us no language is big enough for our love for our children, for Ahmed the little farmer who sleeps beside his beloved rescue cat Suzy. Her purrs drown out the drones and the wails, ya mama, ya mama, at night.

Ahmed buries Suzy after they cannot access treatment. We all cry with him.

VII. What is ‘resilience’ when children are skewered on flag poles, their eyes wide open. When a Gazan man desperately digs up his own daughter? She dies an hour later.

VIII. What words when ambulances and aid workers are riddled with 75 bullet holes?
Homes in pieces; somewhere a school bag, somewhere a wedding album, somewhere an empty cradle.

IX. I have all the theory in the world to explain the logics of our erasure, the violence of our replacements and our more palatable Others. […] But no one’s ever asked how we are both colonised by and inheritors of these words.

What are words when poets are assassinated?

X. What’s the word for a son who refuses to leave his mother’s tombstone? He hasn’t stopped conversing with her since.

XI. No words, no euphemisms, no metaphors, no slogans, no semantics, no ALL-CAPS captions, no headlines, no soundbites, no analogies are enough.

XII. Gaza will not be your glossary for a genocide. Gaza is more than a poem.

With profound thanks to Micaela Sahhar. I imagine this piece to be in kindred conversation with hers: https://www.liminalmag.com/limifest/inventory