The Lost Arabs

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by Omar Sakr


  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,

  and burns. She could be so much more. I could

  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

 

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