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.