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The Lost Arabs

Page 1

by Omar Sakr




  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

  away, or replaced. Here we have

  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.

  I am sure this too is a fantasy. In Beirut, a memorial is taking

  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

 

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