by Omar Sakr
an ugly flag. Plant a new one
in their mouths. This kind of loss
has not been measured, it has no body
count, but we have all the time
in the world to weigh it now.
We have all the time in the world.
*When I wrote this poem in 2017, I was referring to statistics from 2016. As I write this in 2018, I can tell you that in 2017 America dropped 40,000 bombs. From 2014 to 2017, at least 94,000 bombs. In my lifetime alone, the sheer tonnage of destruction and chaos that has been unleashed on majority Muslim or Arab nations has been nothing short of catastrophic, year after year of staggering violence that the population of Western countries seem to accept. Go back further, past my lifetime, my mother’s, and into my grandfather’s and you will still find ample military campaigns and Western-backed violences to highlight the sustained injustice against Arab peoples. You could not do this to those you saw as fully human. Though I had not the heart to seek out the full body count of Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians—the refugees drowned in wave after generational wave of forced migration, of certain death at home or a bleakening hope abroad—the munitions alone tell a deadly, horrifying story.
AT THE SITE OF THE
FUTURE MEMORIAL
I will learn every dead body is impossibly foreign.
Still, their names my name will be lodged
in throats. I will replace the lost with my blood.
I have never given so much of myself before
and, having fucked men this year, usually
I would not be allowed. Aren’t you all the same
will echo through loudspeakers as the guilt
-stricken meander in, awe-splotched &
delirious. Look at what we did. Look
how easy it was.
There will be a fountain splashing blackness &
haphazard TVs showing only National
Geographic. I remember laughing at my father who was
fond of invoking the Afghani kings in our blood.
He burned to be special, to etch glory in these bones.
What does it say about me that I call on the erased,
the shrapnel song of gone? Now that my father is gone
I will try to make a crown for him to wear
and say without irony that we kingdomed Western
Sydney, we wore exquisite costumes. Though imaginary,
it will be rich with gems. I keep annihilating homelands
by turning my back I keep surviving somehow.
I may not be alive for the sight of the future
memorial, in which case it is important to note
I am a writer and to write is to squander life.
It is the only reason I have a place here.
Aren’t you all the same? I don’t recognise
the photos here, and I do. Some of the legs
blown off bodies, those with jeans still on,
could be mine. I use memory to make them
walk again. God, do not let me anywhere
near memory, I beg of you. I keep using it
as a weapon. It is the only thing I know
how to do and that should tell you everything.
AT THE SITE OF THE
FUTURE MEMORIAL
I will illegally build my own Statue of Liberty
alone night and day for a hundred years if need be
and need be
so when I am done I can blow her head off
and fill the jagged cup of her skull
with tears that will not freeze
nor dissipate but always drip
down her stern jaw, her arms, her perfect
dress and into the upturned thirst
of anyone unlucky enough to stand in her shadow.
She has a poignant purpose, yes—for example
if you tip her over she will be an Ark
for all the animals liberty has room for,
but I would be lying if I said I’m doing it
for any reason other than getting to fuck her
face up without reprisal.
AT THE SITE OF THE
FUTURE MEMORIAL
Consider all the other memorials & know the difference
between a memorial and a moratorium, so much lies
in a name. Consider the many still in construction,
those never thought of, the denied, design
in your mind all the palaces of sorrow
you can stand—one for all who came before,
for those who remain, for the Great Barrier
Reef, for roses, for madness, and all extinctions.
Though we have none of the stones necessary
each house in my family fits the bill.
We just don’t charge admission
AT THE SITE OF THE
FUTURE MEMORIAL
I will play footage of American Gods on my phone—no,
not those hideous drones delivering eternities
everywhere—I mean, the episode
with the hung djinn in New York & the salesman,
two hairy men made cosmic with desire, eyes of fire
so we can all see a man give to another man his flame
instead of blood & come away unscathed. Unless
you count love, unless you count its edge, its sweat.
Some will say this is an indulgence, an excess,
but of course the fact he has a big dick is essential,
not just because it’s beautiful but because it is a weapon
and because if a man possessed is to be lessened by gay
sex there must be compensation, a balancing, a coming
to the senses. I can’t turn my criticism off. Too often
I mistake cynicism for criticism. My eyes are burning
again I watch them fuck into astral glory again
I watch them remake my world again I weep
as I never have for death.
AT THE SITE OF THE
FUTURE MEMORIAL
I will tear up the usual, the piles of bodies, the oasis,
the keffiyeh, the dishdasha, the ahwa, the ululation,
the princedom, the mosque, the minaret, the minutes,
the taxi driver, the donkey, the lecher, the angry Arab
Israeli conflict, the hookah, harem, the bloody stones,
the swanky hotel, pool-side glitz, the rugs, the Rolex,
the AK-47, the camo, ammo, the fucking politicians,
the successful literate migrant, the sons of despair,
the oil fields, the hijabs, the thugs, the clubs,
the Quran—everything, I will ruin as I was ruined
once. This, too, is usual. Wait. Turn up the music.
Play it again, life, the ugly, the pulse. Let me dance
in the static, cover the bullet holes in feathers
from every bird. Let me embrace the terrifying
mirage, the sick self. Let the whole building
shrug me off and fly
Waiting for the American Spring
Everyone has the blizzard on their lips.
Batten down. Turn the word over:
a large or overwhelming number of things
arriving suddenly. What could be
more appropriate to sum up the American
condition? A state of being still arriving
suddenly, welcome or not. Cold corpses
line the streets, some alleys, maybe
a park or two—a few no doubt hang
in a frozen lake, swordless, wondering
how it was they ate their dreams &
still went hungry. I’m talking bodies
> concaved with wanting, talking ice
-mantled animals. Small losses mount,
small squalls merge. It’s never sudden,
not really—more an accumulation.
You can talk about it before every dawn
and still be shocked by the force
when it hits. Another meaning: denote
a violent blow. As when wind uproots
an oak, or a boy shakes another boy
until his teeth shatter. There are cities
here without clean water. Black bodies
shaken until they shatter in the street
as they have since the first blizzard—
meaning: whiteout—stole them. Now
the world winters a storm where the stolen
refuse to remain lost, buried in snow.
They get up on lips, the as yet unghosted
armed with the tinder of names. Think
of all the bodies shivering across country,
the azan bottled up in blue throats,
the borders of suddenly always cutting. When
will this arrival stop overwhelming? You
can’t build a wall around a season,
a forest of bone, a land always dying.
Look to your bleached plains and ask
how much longer can you last
without real food or a sprig of green?
A Moratorium on Cartography
Burn all the maps. Forget about want
I need unspoiled long-&-latitudes.
Some unguttered earth, a place
even the stars haven’t touched
where I can come up for air,
where there is no such thing
as drowning, and no killing
but in which I can still die
a natural death. Impossible
dreams are for young men.
I am not as young as necessary.
It could be a dream this large
requires age, and I am not old
either. Countries are unwieldy
things not to be made alone.
I wish someone told me that
before I started building beaches.
It’s got nothing to do with land,
that gorgeous animal. I just forgot
the people. Maybe I meant to &
I should make the most of these
acacias, the long tapering bushes
before they inevitably burst
into flame, the language not
of gods but of man. Prometheus
knew. It is a lesson we unlearn
as often as we can: alphabets
are all sinuous destruction.
All we wanted was to sear
a moment, a handprint, a hunt
into the rock to let it know
our names, unaware naming
the world would also end it.
My country resists language.
It does not want to know you.
It has its own knowledge, and no
holes for flags. It can’t be
stolen. I have carved it out
of freedom. Now what it means
to be free is in pieces and there
is no such thing as peace.
Tinder
I would swipe right on torture.
This is not a great start
to the relationship. The truth is best
saved until it’s too late or too hard
to reject: prevent the body
from flinching in status-preserving instinct,
get it to swallow the poison
of a toxic beginning, a vaccine for history
that necromantic motherfucker always
trying to resurrect itself, to live
again now. We are always saying honesty
is necessary but nobody talks about when
or where this razor should be applied,
as in the case of a poem. Poems do not need
an I to work the way the system needs
an eye to work, one for you & nobody
else. You work better when you only look
out for yourself. Stay focused
as you move the blade: I would swipe right
on torture. I know it happens
with each scoop of cereal, each crunch
of sugar electrocuting happiness
up my spinal column—somewhere
someone is being electrocuted
for real and I carry living
on because this is the price of doing
business, which in my case is writing
poems and having one eye and
trying to stay focused on the wobbling spoon
of conductive metal aimed at my teeth.
I put torture in a box and I hide the box
(which is heavier than my body)
under my bed, and I wonder how
I’m going to get someone to fuck me
on a mattress full of screams.
Among Bloody Oracles
Time constantly remembers
the man tall as anything, his hair electrified
worms, his hands all knuckles & bone,
clutching a red white blue striped bag.
He stood outside my boyhood & I, small
as anything, approached his unstatic
body. Turning, one eye wild, one tame,
he opened his mouth and time zombie
climbed its way out his gaping lips.
“My parents were cut down by the SS,”
he said, then popped out a marbled eye,
I forget which one, and planted it deep
across my palmed life & love & loss
lines. I closed my hand over its hard
vision, looked up into his black hole
where a smaller, sadder me wrote
this poem. I did not know how to say
sorry for what I could not comprehend.
I gave back his world, touched now
by young flesh, to plug the wound.
Wet with sweat, it would blossom
next spring, the sweetest flower ever
to leaf. I tremble on the edge of carpal
swelling out in concentric whorls
of luck, that bitter fruit. Today stalks
rotting memory, pecking out chunks
of spoil. The past does the same,
their blood mixing together as I
walk down the supermarket aisle,
pick an apple off the mushed face
of some unfortunate, grab a bottle of
condensed fiscal uncertainty, and pay
at the counter, a man in uniform
who looks like a young woman smiling
but is a man in uniform cutting down
a body in a camp somewhere. They
do not notice I have given an eye to pay,
but place it in the cash register full
of all the other eyeballs rolling together
in the soft wilful dark.
Self-Portrait as Poetry Defending Itself
The birds tell me the nest is crucial but can’t hold
all of us. Stay on the wind as long as it will carry
you, then find a home, build it from everything
a tree has let go. My aunty tells me forgetting
has a survival value by saying nothing at all.
This is only what I tell myself with her mouth:
in Arabic, the word for mercy and forgiveness
is the same. Some birds use lit sticks to fan the
flames of a bushfire, and feast on what es
capes.
Those who live tell me there is no such thing
as escape, that once you’ve been burned
everything resembles a flame. Who in this
story deserves mercy and at what cost?
Should the bird go hungry, the tree unburned
the air untasked with speeding on death, or me
the fool at the end of it all trying to make sense
of suffering. This is only a replica. The pain came
and went, yet here I am invoking it again, a nest
I re-create to burn over and over until I learn
I cannot be saved or forgiven for what I lived
through. I keep looking to the world for a salvation
it has never known, keep winging toward a word
like water, a mirror, a mover, a matter, a mother,
a word closer to but not as smothering as solace.
I never want to arrive at a sweetened language,
or to speak the unfindable word, my sole desire
is to hold it between my teeth, and to be held.
Extermination
The man, of unknown origin, revealed himself
as Arab when he took his shoes off at the door.
There were other signs but I cannot tell you.
He arrived armed for chemical warfare
as we all do. His socks were soft, grey.
We told him not to worry, the floor
was tiled, easy to clean. He insisted on leaving
his muddiness behind. Flexed his toes on white.
I followed the tense up his hairy brown
legs, until his shorts hid the muscled rest.
He sprayed as he went, tank of poison in hand.
There were rat droppings in the ceiling.
A crunchy rain fell, startled cockroaches
waking to light and death as every child does.
They kissed his feet and for that I envied them.
Landscaping
The grass loops long outside my window. Sags into itself. A thousand lithe men bowing
in one direction, a lone sunflower here & there draped over their knees. Little sluts.
I forget to cut them down. It is winter now and the sea of green is bright with death
as if begging for the attention of the blade. I can’t afford a lawnmower. Still, I picture
myself pushing a fat hungry thing on the yard, shirtless, a thick beast among snaking
weeds. I’m unsure what to kill out here. What qualifies as weed: nasty useless unflower,
purposeless growth—and anything that isn’t beautiful has no purpose, I’ve heard.
The grass though, if grass it is, has such luscious curls. It tells there is beauty in neglect.