Poetry

lies told honestly in three propositions by Sahar Khraibani

1.

I wrote a poem on the subway

We drove across the Sonoran desert at 10 pm
And it felt like
Two in the morning
The I-10 at night is pitch black
But you can see the stars
Like you’ve never seen them before
In your little hometown
Polluted by lights
And a thick layer of smog
From nitrogen
And all the cigarettes
Everyone smoked

On the F train
Passing West 4^th St
Sitting next to a man I don’t know
His skin is darker than mine
I don’t want to be scared
But I am
K told me about the reservations
And how casinos are important
For native people
It felt odd
To not know any of these things
And then to know them

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2.

Our histories are merging
As mine is forming

I never write poems on the train
I’d been always preoccupied
With my destination
And what station’s next
And the passed out man
And the sad woman crying

We have some favorite spots in the city
This is how it becomes a home
When you stop needing directions
To a destination unknown

I woke up this morning
Sulking sulking
Sulking
“Stress paralysis is real”
I tell S

A guy in Koreatown is really pissed on the phone
Because a dumplings spot he used to frequent 10 years ago is gone

3.

We have no sense of history
Yet are so embedded in it
It follows us everywhere

Drove down Embassy Row
In Washington DC
One man standing under the rain with an umbrella
“I am the Sudan revolution”

The I
Stands in between
History
And the reclaiming of it

“The great force of history
Comes from the fact fact we carry
It within us, are unconsciously
Controlled by it… history is literally
Present in all that we do”
Wrote James Baldwin

I have no sense of history
In the passenger seat
In the car
Driving across the Sonoran Desert
Across Embassy Row in Washington DC
I can’t reclaim it.

Maskoon by Sara Elkamel

We clung to our dreams like ants to sugar.
In them we walked, we meandered uncertain,
we strained to remember

colors of the sea. Then in dream after dream
the homes of our mothers
and fathers crumbled.

They gave them away.
Like clowns, we writhed
and we screamed. Now we can never go back.

When we rise, we assemble the bones
we’ve collected. We toss orange after orange into the water,
watch them float.

We are a queenless colony, feeding on itself.
We recall the crowns
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one side sewn exactly, pink lines inclined like lashes,
the other gouged out by our feet.

When we were in the desert,

it was difficult to find the end of things.
We dreamed we danced and bled,
and climbed skies for the goats we loved.

Here, someone
asks: is it like this every night?
But the night does not answer.

Dust

by Lana Habash

Stone streets of an old city,
carts lined with rings of fresh bread,
seeded sesame, the scent
of coffee mixed with zalabieh,
where songs of prayer mark time–
here, the hand of God is pressed
in stone. Touch your hand there
palm to palm,
and time will pass
through your fingers,
more enduring than belief. Uniformed men
set against the sky, the dawn
ignores them. A young boy stands,
circled by men, guns
slung over shoulders
like shopping bags. The boy
leans back, delivers the blow,
runs. He knows where and how.
And like the Sea the merchants part,
then rushing back,
one current now, an old man slows
the push of his cart, a woman
slows too and smiles.

***

Stories We Tell

How Haja stood at the door,
hands raised to her son
Don’t come in
with those.
How he took
the grenades
from each pocket
as if they were lemons,
with a smile that said,
There’s no need for all that.
Or how the khuwana
stopped our men,
bent over the road,
the last pieces of home
on their backs,
how the men
lifted their heads
to ask Did you sell it
furnished?

Or how the checkpoint soldier
questioned the farmer
What do you
feed your chickens?
day after day,
then turned him back
for the wrong answer.
How finally the farmer
said with a shrug,
I give them money.
They decide for themselves.

Or the young boys loaded
on an army truck,
set free
by pleading hands,
women
who cry My son!
and tear their hair.
How the women took
the puzzled faces
to their own,
saying, Go to your own home now,
child.

How on the morning
of tawjihi,
the schoolboy
arrived early,
stopped at the designated
knot on the string,
threw down his books,
took off his shirt,
to demand
that the beating
be quick.

Or how the teacher,
now the line
that won’t
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laughed
as she picked up the stone,

The land
knows
who loves it.

***

Stories We Don’t

Women who carry life
give birth to the dead
at the waiting points
on the open road.

An olive tree on its side,
gnarled fingers reach to the sky,

land is not place.

Of course there was the house
lost,
child loaded
onto a garbage truck,
eyes toward home,
eyes always toward home,
and of course there were those
not so lucky as that,
who died on the long walk,

and of course for the living
the attic came next,
the cold floor,
the seven bodies.
Yes, there were tents, walls, stone,
perhaps a house,
and the names our children bear:
Jaffa
Haifa
Beisan
Jenin,

what a people must swallow:
the hollows of a culture not ours,
the land wet with blood
of others like us
thrown into
the singular
strangeness
of exile,
the thirty years it took
to see their shadows
on every Washington and Main,
this land of ghosts,
the outlines of a brother here,
a sister there,
their eyes, accusing
their eyes, the future.

Maybe regret is passed on
to daughters.
We carry it with us,
pieces of home
on our backs,
one camp to another,
waiting.

And yes,
we remember, still see
her, sister, bearing life,
as she begged for maya
on the dusty road, see her stumble
on the stones,
push herself
up,
bearing life,
stumble again,
till finally
she lay still,
the dust
from the road
mixed with her hair
and dry lips
bearing life–

dust
means something different
to us.

Two Poems by Lina Al-Sharif

Relationship Goals

When on good terms,
my parents debated the prices
of fruits and vegetables.
Love letters were sent in praise
of my father’s excellent choice of
mint leaves and parsley.
Fights were coded in unsavory criticism
of my mum’s punctured marrows and uneconomical
purchases of hard avocados and sour strawberries.
Reconciliations were held over a festive plate
of khobiza with nestling red chilies and puffy bread
after all, they know their onions.

Ghazal: My Mother

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I hold no land dearer than the one of my mother

I roam faraway countries and pray to find a home
but I keep coming back to the map given to me by my mother

I wear the perfume of burnt orange rind and read the future in coal
I whisper my prayer, scream at my children; I become my mother

I close my eyes and hide thinking of running away
my daughter asks why the refugee boy is crying “where’s my mother?”
I buy parsley I never use, cancel plans I never wanted to make
I forget recipes and repeat “curse me” as said by my mother

I chase a few poems after everyone goes to bed
pretend there’s more to me than being a mother
but what’s more than being like my mother?

I Had Never Seen a Dead Man Before By Hedy Habra

Until my father-in-law died that summer in Tucson, Arizona

He seemed to sleep
in his suit and tie,
expressionless,
the color of death freezing
his shrunken features,
almost youthful in his eighties
as if an artist’s pencil
performed a final facelift,
inverting lines
for a last farewell.

I knelt on the velvet
rest in prayer.
thinking of the fig tree
we once planted together,
of how he always
saved the juiciest fig
for me: “Here,” he’d say
“this one’s from your tree…
see how well I care for it?”

∞ ∞

I felt a pang in my chest,
leapt years and years back
to a January morning: a young
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I was never told what had
happened that day,
in Heliopolis. “Your father
is in the hospital,” they said.

I awaited your return,
week after week,
unable to understand
the silent procession,
charcoaled silhouettes
shading spaces
once forbidden to
our clumsy hands,
beveled doors
now wide-open,
black skirts hiding pink
damask silk, flowing
over gilded Louis XVI
chairs and Bergères
like a flock of Egyptian
ravens, threatening
my caged love-birds
placed at the balcony edge

Untitled by Jenna Hamed

Traditions in carry-on bags/ carried on backs/ now become furnishings/ with unfingered holybooks/ failed wallhangings/ in 1 of 2-familyhome’s livingrooms/

Make one word for livingroom/ no// one word for 2 familyhome livingrooms/ make one word for family/ home/ one word for un holybooks/ unholy fingerings/ making walls/ with failed paintings/ I’m waiting/ make one word/ for furnishings on backs/ furnishings in bags/ bags of tradition/
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Bags become words in failed painting traditions/ bags become word for family/ become word for home/ become word for living/ become word for room/ become word for 2 families’ home living-room/

GREAT COAL BEDS OF SOME WORLD By Glenn Shaheen

The sky is blue where blue was ash and soot,
another fire is beamed from screen to air.
We learn of it and gasp and choke. On foot
we rush to learn of darkness from the stare

of actors in some film. Yes, we got jokes,
the politicians desperately inept,
so why’d we want the show to end? The croaks
that seep in to our shade are frogs at best,
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the gasping cries of dying kids at worst
but get real, they’re frogs. The soot is raining,
that ought to put an end to fires that burst
from clickbait. I’m good, I’m entertaining,

I’m good at entertaining. Lovely chumps,
what suckers, we keep begging for more lumps.

Lugha by Hanan Issa

An assured composition,
the confident guttural ‘gh’,
haloed,
the nur of Allah’s language

eviscerates fruitless scratchings,
plaiting words of Welsh or French,
inept,
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A wounded bird,
its upward basking curtailed,
flailing,
I implore with my patchwork tongue.

^[1] Arabic word meaning ‘language’

For Fear that My Parents Will Never Understand My Poetry By Philipe Abiyouness

I no longer write poems about self-love because I figured it out.
Now, I write poems to tell my loved ones that I see beauty as far as the edge of their silhouettes.
That when trains are delayed I feed on their war stories and bathe in their jokes.
This is to say they have built me a fortress with legs and a thumping heart and hair that stands on end when morning bows before the hours.

I have known the imposters, took the time to kiss their cheeks and taste their words.
Their pithy left my tongue sour. They wear secondhand capes of culture, bought off those
that could no longer afford to keep it and dance to songs they did not write.

Culture is not a subscription.
Culture cannot be whittled down to knowledge reaped from a book.

Culture is cutting fruit in the palm of your hand
and sipping rosewater to ease the stomach.

Culture is sleeping four to a bedroom because nobody gets left behind.
Culture is generators visible like lighthouses
and filling the soap bottle with water when it is running low
and cutting the toothpaste tube in half.

Culture is not a lover to be fetishized and worshiped
rather a stubborn child screaming over all that you do
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that the earth is always moving and holding onto something
is mercy and reckoning boiled holy warm.

My mother reads me poems in Arabic and I watch her hands painting skies
and swatting gnats. Her eyes look up to see if I am understanding. I do not
understand the words, but the crack in her voice I understand. Her drawn out syllables and gaping mouth, I understand because my mother colored
my childhood with poetry every time she prayed the rosary by candlelight
and every time she made me wait in the laundromat for hours, so long
that I memorized all of the vending machine options and their corresponding numbers (Fritos A4). My mother wrote me a poem every time she locked the door and drove slow and fried fish on Friday.

My family is meter and measure and would hate this poem
because, “aren’t poems supposed to rhyme?” but still I send my brother
every basketball ballad I find, because are we not spun from the same hands, calloused and marshmallow?
(There is nothing tepid about upbringing)

Maybe one day they will lose the tops of their heads
to something radical and begging, like I am lost in their story,
forever attempting to write their fingerprints into cities
sprawling and forgiving.

Poets Tending to the Aches of Empires By Shadab Hashmi

When you are broken-boned, heaped upon
the deadly alloys of power, retching
on the saffron and citruses of our own
planting, remember how good we were with
salvaging beauty, blunting edges with imagination’s
cotton kiss, remember the night-boats to villages
of authors of the past when you didn’t leave your bed,
locking tealeaves in summer lotuses that open
with the brave clove of the moon in your cup

Naming the hungers in Hangzhou

Twice-seasoned soup at dawn, along with shreds
of hot puff-pastry and steamed rice before
beginning the business of the day with
a naked quill and an innocent scroll— the
Hangzhou Tea Merchant puts the moonrise to
shame in his lifting of delicate burdens,
distilling an epoch’s hunger in his poem.
Though empire prospers, and even commoners
may eat more than thirty kinds of vegetables and
seventeen types of beans, there are aches borne of hungers.

The poet, an apothecary in Nishapur

pounds the finest husks, seeds, barks and roots. Soon,
the Mongol conflagration of forest and field,
library, mosque and hospital will feed
an ashen history. He wraps salves in torn
pages of poetry. The mauve blooms and leaves flicker
their last as the wind brings carrion-burning stench—
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Attar is lifted by birdsong: in remembrance
of God, hearts find serenity, the ringdove
repeats. Wings folded, she tends to the poet’s ache.

Rumi reads The Conference of the Birds

and pens: “Attar has traversed the seven cities
of Love. We are still at the turn of one
street.” An exile from Balkh to Anatolia,
the Mongol invasion forces him West—
On the way: corpses eaten by stork, kites,
porcupines. What was the text of the sweet
basil of Samarkand? What did the hoopoe
behold after a lifetime of flying
through the valleys of quest? The birds of the book
travel East, Rumi finds the ancient beloved everywhere.

Tomb of Al Ghazali

The rebecs, musk roses, onyx towers,
diamond-encrusted ewers are gone, as are
the artisans, the ink-and quill-crafters, translators,
navigators, perfumers, tyrants, ascetics,
and the teahouses and mosques and madrassas
where the Sufi taught how to find the Divine
without seeking ownership of piety. In the decay,
melon vines and jasmines sweeten
with the sage, gardenias run wild. In the
sunken ruins, mynahs, the irreverent pilgrims, chirrup.