in her nature

Your friend, who suffers from despair, sometimes composes a gratitude list that starts with the first letter of the alphabet. Her intention is to make it to the twenty-sixth, but she always stops at e. So far, that's sufficient. “E for eggs” gives her enough good feeling to turn on the light and find some shoes.

What is it like,

                              to be shackled to the chains of freedom,

to the glee of greener pasture? What is it like

                   to be carouseled in the circular dreams of fools,

a play ride

          with suspended hopes that really takes you nowhere.

And a few weeks ago, in my daughter’s old stroller,

                                                 I tended to the wren’s eggs

and watched the hatched birdies

                                                       call out feathers to their wings.

And you wonder why I refuse to learn an old anthem

                               where there is nothing old or new to grasp.

Well, where the young are haunted by the nostalgias of the old, 

     who entrusts the future to the hands of destruction?

Who?

     I promise you, I am not angry, I am just tired of  believing

in a future led by fools.

         And if you hear fool one more time, bear with me.

I come from a nest of oafs.

                                            I come from a nest, of oafs.

Yahya Ashour

My father taught me how to write: على قد لحافك، مد رجليك. Extend your legs as far as your blanket.

When I find parts of my poems   exposed, I amputate them.

I keep them tucked in   light or night, away from those hunting   for lines that don’t fit their blankets not realizing poetry lies

in a poet’s satisfaction with their blanket.

In my pursuit of tender lines, I’ve become a butcher, committing crimes against myself for the sake of  beauty.

Maha Hashwi

I am fine and of course I am lying remember   I am Lebanese

or nod ask how everyone I know is doing   don’t

you see   that far away country   my mother

bursts into tears   the front door   resilient

smoke   dust   the rubble has become

blanket and bed   warm like mine   the fire

is blazing   the flag   burnt flesh on a phone screen

the demolition   of war   what is the definition

fleeing their homes   they are   dying

they are not   crying out for help   lend a

hand   hold a   heart

for being arab   I am not brave

(via Lara Atallah: "Spectral Prophecies")

Speckled omens leave their fingerprints on their ghostly faces. The fleeting patter of rain slicks the asphalt beneath them. This is how history gets rewritten: in the gaps between their bodies, against the backdrop of early spring. Somewhere in the long middle of the end. He, in military attire, an oak tree with galaxies smeared inside him. She, a forest in a barren world. By now, I know how this story goes. The war will architect their undoing, decades and petty arguments stacked up against a god of futile things. Illness will harvest their lifespans. He will gasp for eight years, bargaining with fate. Her heart will break again and again until it gives out. Between them, a daughter. One day, a mother whose face will mark mine. In that moment, flanked by her parents, she stands infinite as the trees behind her. Hair draping shoulders. Body barely pubescent. Hand over heart. You can tell she still believes the world loves her. Head tilted upwards, she dreams herself in-flight, hedging her bets on the vastness of a borderless sky.

Literary Theory

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. We hear with our skeletons’ bones. We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, a walled garden. Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one. A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers. Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden. Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again, restarts.  

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted. Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.