The Lost Arabs

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by Omar Sakr


  men. None of them knew how to touch without

  wounding and all of them touched

  instinctively. This is what they taught me,

  to trust the lesson the gasp imparts. Yaani I strip

  back the skin not to bare the fault lines

  but to know: it is possible to ask too much

  of a colour, which is to say light. Together

  they insist on revealing blood, as if blood,

  especially the human kind, can’t tell a lie

  or turn against itself, when its first narrative

  was one of expulsion, and its first product was Cain.

  Do you see? My grandfather and his children, my mother

  & my body, my body and itself. Always turning

  away from a country. The truth is: it is easy to give

  trauma a body. To a body. I mean, it wants to be made

  visible, a transformation often

  mistaken for a miracle, a healing action. Like light

  I love to dance before mirrors naked, rude,

  dripping. This is what you are here for: the epiphany

  of my flesh, the violent manifesto, the prophecy divined

  through diaspora, the spilled guts of sacrificial

  animals opening a new future,

  the many born of one.

  ii.

  I strip back my flesh my bloody ego. Come

  meet me at the juncture of knee & history,

  here my bestial memories cluster

  in glorious hymnal each beak and snout

  and jowl closeting a secret, an ordinariness,

  a child, a lust. I rule over them, an abject king,

  an ungovernable queen with a heel on every

  throat. Don’t listen to me. Hear the humming

  insects digging in, which is the sound of Mum

  gargling in the kitchen snorting a line

  straight out of this suburban kingdom

  and into a place of her own. I keep inventing

  a place for her to own. My ego again.

  It never lasts, my fantasy, be it Lebanon

  or a bone forest or an unlikely

  evergreen, a thriving joyful something—

  instead, memory

  overwhelms everything & I see a coastal city

  that spells her father’s addictive name, that shreds

  her girlhood where she staggers through the heat,

  an axe in hand, ready to make beautiful

  his body with an old ruin & slake

  a different kind of thirst. I have learned

  to ask too much of beauty, to beg it

  for vengeance

  and still, it answers.

  iii.

  I strip back my bones, leave only a sovereign

  melancholia, a light in pieces, a glittering I don’t dare

  hold. In shattered mirrors my father is still

  alive, his eyes a web of red, a laugh curving

  his lips, waiting for me to turn and acknowledge

  his terrible throne. This is the trouble

  with faith, it fathers and leaves you

  with children who refuse to die

  Out on the Way to Melbourne

  i.

  a boy embalmed by the sun

  cricket bat held high

  pools of mud by spent tractors

  and unspent men

  stray cattle gracing the grazing

  fields, oozing methane

  a winding wooden spine nailed to hills,

  a continuous crucifixion—

  i pass over it untouched, a desire

  thrumming through

  half-heard half-hearted

  lacking the conviction

  of this ugly flower, a clenched fist

  of beaten gold.

  ii.

  this morning, i woke up & forgot

  how to pray.

  i scrambled for god

  the correct sequence of words

  the rhythm

  beneath it all. i strained

  & mumbled, a note here, an amen there

  like the night before, sweating

  hallelujah in heat

  bodies like confessional boxes long

  unused & full of secrets.

  as the day withdraws i am out

  in the canola fields, trying to recall

  what faith is and to resist

  the voice softly saying, throw yourself

  into the nearest burning bush.

  do not listen if it speaks to you—

  simply burn.

  iii.

  i leave country behind

  sick pastoral ghosts & mad cows

  uttering fag fag fag

  or maybe it was fog,

  soft song of confusion. i

  don’t blame the animals,

  they only repeat what they hear.

  back in my devastated home

  land, i am a vulgar prince

  with an invader’s tongue

  in my mouth & i love it.

  i go to the olive groves

  ready to wear a dress of flame

  and a hundred pitted eyes say:

  history is one long receipt &

  all our names are on it.

  A Beautiful Child

  after Jericho Brown

  You are not as tired of diaspora

  poetry as I am of the diaspora. Sometimes

  I thank God that I was born inside an American

  -made tank. Sometimes I weep within

  the beast. My uncle works on the railroads

  and goes home to his nuclear family loathing

  my queerness from afar. He and I tend

  our silence, a beautiful child

  until it speaks. Another uncle is a guard

  with two ex-wives and a secret love

  of comic books. Tragedy made him the head

  of his family too soon. Don’t weep for your dad

  he said, weep for me. “You didn’t know him

  like I did.” I have a third uncle, a mechanic

  who visits his home in Lebanon every year

  & now I must admit English has failed me.

  I should say kholo, my mother’s brother.

  I should say umja, my father’s brother

  so you know which branch of the tree to cut—or

  cherish. My uncles are doused in industry, good sons

  of the State. They get on with what needs

  getting on. Language is their least favourite

  daughter. They use their mouths for breath

  and do their best to forget the world

  outside. I think they love where they come

  from but in truth, I have never heard them

  say so, except to mutter they do not want

  to pay taxes in two countries come on

  one is killing them already &

  isn’t that enough

  Choose Your Own Erasure

  In a Field She Twirls, Arms Akimbo & the World Stops

  to Watch (or: Happiness)

  In this poem, my mother has no purpose

  beyond existing, beyond beauty, beyond

  dancing beneath the stars. Let me give

  way before meaning, let me incoherent,

  let me give her this one shining moment.

  In a Field We Twirl, Arms Akimbo & the World Stops

  (or: Grief)

  In this poem, trauma is not the villain

  to whom all blame is allocated, trauma

  has no cape, no moustache to twirl, no


  body to act through, no blood to poison

  & my mother knows precisely the harm

  she is causing. She knows its name.

  She calls it: his story. She makes it ours.

  In a Field, the World (or: Rage)

  In this poem, a country is unwinnable,

  unwoundable, unowned. It never

  justifies killing people. It does not want

  our bodies. It lives, and loves the living.

  It knows no other way and resists

  whenever we try to teach it otherwise.

  In a Field (or: Denial)

  In this poem, absence is recalibrated.

  Absence is a deer springing over logs.

  It is flighty but incapable of damaging

  you intangibly. It can still stand still

  on a road, and cause a car to crash

  or swerve into a monstrous silence,

  the kind that follows any arrival.

  In (or: Acceptance)

  In this poem, I am a boy desiring

  other boys without consequence,

  I suck dick with abandon, fear free

  from my tongue. I am beholden

  not to desire but to myself, my love,

  the women, the men, all of us

  fixated on the thresholds

  of bliss or a way to displace

  for a second or an hour

  the exit that haunts the body.

  Federation (Square)

  This place reminds me of a Holocaust

  memorial, an uneven jumble of stones,

  architecture twisting my vision.

  Only this is meant to be beautiful.

  I don’t know what it remembers,

  if it can speak to that other square

  in a distant city burdened with memory,

  to the makers of it & to those who desire

  to dip a slender milky foot into history,

  a kind of accessible suffering captured

  on camera. You know the solemn ones

  in their duty-free sunglasses or else

  unbearably in love, smiling.

  There is no good way to be here

  or anywhere else. At least there

  are trams, trains, buses, and cabs;

  we need as many ways to flee

  as possible. You can leave this poem

  every 8 minutes in any number of directions

  new meaning arrives. Perhaps it’s better

  to say arises, that it struggles out the earth or

  wafts free off the wide back of the mud

  brown river or falls from the long low head

  of a tree. New doesn’t mean better,

  remember once the other is elsewhere,

  it’s hard to get back. Maybe impossible.

  I don’t blame the open for what comes.

  Everything reminds me of the dead.

  My ghosts are as noisy as the colony

  of gulls pecking food from my hands.

  The Lost Arabs

  for my dear Najwan

  In the kingdom of lost Arabs, every rock is a beautiful

  separatist until you spit on it.

  In some cultures spit is a benediction.

  Give me the waters of your tongue, any wet word

  can soothe a silent throat and mine

  keeps closing over my mother, grandmother,

  and even my slowest, least kind cousins

  who can speak with the thick voice of our people

  and who, with each sloshing mouthful, locate

  themselves in our country. My teeth

  dream of the three nations that yellow

  their bone. I wet their edges,

  a clueless cartographer who has never known a hill

  or a river that wasn’t stolen from someone

  and so can never know their true shape.

  When I look at our names, all I see are squiggly lines.

  Would you believe I keep trying to find the poetry

  in a wound? How foolish. How graceless. And yet:

  a man who knows his history told me it was in my blood.

  What idiot put it there?

  Maybe this is why I have spilled so much of it on the blade

  of authenticity. Cut down

  those I deemed false, all the others I loved—and love—

  but refused to become. Every day

  my certainty collapses. That I am lost. Or can be found.

  That there is such a thing as Arab.

  None of this is real, it exists only in your mind,

  the stone I cleaved with this sword.

  Pull it out if you can, if you dare a kingdom

  awaits the steady

  hands of a new butcher. I confess myself

  unequal to the task.

  Where God Is

  The jihadi in his cargos and camo, his fake beard and sunnies, stands bowlegged

  in the desert/ed parking lot. He has no quiver of arrows, but a belt of gold teeth,

  a wicked / smile looped around his chest. He looks like my cousin / as he squints

  at me, ready to spit. / “Where can you find God?” / he says. They ask this of every poet

  or faggot or Westerner / my not-cousin assures me / they are all poets. He swears

  he is not my cousin / refuses me his name. / I am sweating like a used horse. I hate

  games / I can’t win. / There are two answers. The first is now/here, as glory is beyond

  small / animals. We live in the absence of divinity, and by our actions / hope to create

  an echo here, to call it back. The other / answer is everywhere: heaven / in torn Coke

  cans, in my dirty / armpit, in laundry, in a brothel / deluged with rain, in every single

  breath sucked in by living things, the dead / echoing. I say nothing / full of the stink

  of myself. The man / who could be my cousin—this is to say I could love him—laughs,

  puts a cold black mouth to my ear / and I hear, “Listen. / You will find God here.”

  Then the angels started barking

  Searchlight

  I lay above this poem as I lay above my body

  watching it all go wrong. I, the Arab cannot

  enter this space. I, the Arab am not just

  an Arab. I have another mad blood

  product of a con man and a junkie—sorry,

  substance abuse(r)—I, the Arab am

  familiar with a relentless need, with never

  having enough, a cracked cup

  that mocks notions of being half of anything.

  Whatever I have dribbles out, dews

  the fracture. I, the Arab am surrounded

  by a blast radius where a tree should be

  & so I am always in mourning. I desire

  the shade of those long branches,

  the particular shape of a hundred names

  whether all of them were shady sand-fuckers

  turning tricks in a trashy gutter or worse,

  capitalists, which is to say, soldiers

  of fortune. Anyway, someone surely must

  have been good, or known the joyous

  thrum of a song or being held as a son

  by a human who loves you

  even if later on they kicked in your teeth.

  None of this is what I wanted

  to say in search of my inheritance,

  that sad will-o’-wisp, leader of the lost

  and soon to be drowned. I want to drink

  in these marshes, make my mouth glow

  with mushroom bloom but my jaw,

  so like my grandfa
ther’s, is cracked

  & leaking. This is my legacy, dear

  children: an endless migration

  to what was or might have been,

  the manacles of a horrid imagination

  and somewhere I swear to God

  the Most Merciful, a smile, praise.

  Every Day

  Every day I say a prayer for Palestine

  And every day a dog runs away with it

  Vanishing down an alley, tail wagging

  To benefit who knows which wretch.

  I tell myself it doesn’t matter who receives

  The gift of my kindness. Such lovely lies

  We bestow upon ourselves. Sometimes

  I am the dog fleeing with a bastard’s

  Love clenched in my slavering jaw.

  Sometimes I am the one curled at the end

  Of an alley, blessed by the unexpected

  Warmth of a snuffling mouth telling

  Me I am not forgotten. Every day

  I say a prayer for Palestine

  Do Not Rush

  to make a judgment.

  You can savage a body at speed.

  A city can be ruined in an hour.

  A love of decades dashed in a second.

  It takes nine months to start a life.

  It should take as long to end one.

  After a trigger is pulled and before

  a bullet lands, give nine months

  to the target to welcome the hole,

  to accept the blood, the blunt lead,

  the new body. I know it is possible

  to allow a death to gestate. Watch

  time mushroom out from a bomber

  and seasons unfurl on the city below.

  Spring in Baghdad to winter in Aleppo,

  one final semester of learning, a retreat

  by a river, time enough to be thankful

  for old books and DVDs borrowed,

  to study the bullet or the blast with

  a lover’s eye. It seems a short goodbye

  but last year alone America dropped

  26,171* bombs on brown bodies,

  on our trees and animals and homes.

  That’s 235,539 months or 19,628 years

  to process the devastation of one.

  Honestly, I am unsure of the maths.

  Give or take a week, millenniums

  are still owed to the lost. I don’t know

  how to calculate for the land or

  the numbers for the unlucky survivors,

  the dust-strewn rubble-reapers looking

  for family in red rocks, for burned

  paper that might hold a shred of name,

  for safe waters that will not drown

  them, for borders that will not cut

  their feet or demand they unstitch

  history from their backs. Call it

 

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