^{translated from the Persian by Hajar Hussaini}

I should have recited this poem before you fell to the ground
before the heart discarded October pomegranates in Tehran 
before blowing our hair in the streets 
because the audience’s authority rendered our bodies impartial
and it’s not nighttime on our side
on our side, there was a creature scattering salt on our blood current 
and we had disputed our blood 
we had disputed our soil 
and we had paid our taxes off our veins to the passport police 
we abandoned our bodies faster than a shrapnel
return to the blood!
return to your skin 
which is devoid of memory 
to the traces of your silver flakes in the streams of Tajrish
return to the language!
to its abrasion with the sharpness of a paper’s edge and nipple  
            expel your suppressing cells 
through your tongue 
            expel your bare being 
through your tongue
            expel your alphabet’s clinical infection 
through your tongue 
            expel the lingering lipstick on splinters of meaning 
through your tongue
            expel the pinkish vomit in the refugee camp 
through your tongue 
            insert your head into your belly, then expel your unholy human 
through your tongue 
            expel your socialist receipts 
through your tongue 
            expel the clock set on your four different geographies 
through your tongue
            expel the reflection of the knife as you’re flaking your skin 
through your tongue 
            expel the resemblances of others’ words in your own poems 
through your tongue 
            expel your scheduled appointments with the bank, with Préfecture, and your lawyer
through your tongue 
            expel your blood on the corner of the public bathroom stall 
through your tongue 
return to the blood
for its permissible and auspicious 
and don’t remember any one person 
do not remember them 
because lips have their own means of forgetting 
an asylum seeker knows roasting hunted meat is more pleasant  
how can an asylum seeker forget about having been kissed
her smile emerges from a frightening darkroom of individual deaths 
however much it’s idiosyncratic, it’s public 
I should have recited this poem before I fell to the ground
I have pinned collective suffering, and it hangs on my chest 
I told the Arab man about the signs of heat in the collarbone he had touched 
I called my body homeland and told the Romanian man about the silver flakes, how they can’t keep you warm 
he threw his spear into the pond in the middle of the square to save his mother from her bedsore 
at the time, we were holding onto the vegetable vessels of Italy 
then to the fish’s mouth I said I have given ten more births than your mother
and I sank into my ashen blank skin
and I sank into my ashen blank tongue 
the rain was not equal on all floors 
the Ukrainian woman opened her umbrella 
black people started dancing in a circle 
the Arab people also danced 
I sank into my ashen skin to the point
the sun brought me blood from the sliced streets 
and the man, behind the desk, with a romantic French accent, kept whispering 
go back to blood 
because it’s permissible and auspicious

پناهنده

این شعر را قبل از به خاک افتادنت باید میسرودم
قبل از دل ترکاندن انارهای آبان در تهران
قبل از وزش موهایمان در خیابان 
که تن مان را اتوریته یِ تماشاگران بی طرف کرده بود 
و ( طرف ما که شب نبود)
طرفِ ما جانوری بود که در جریان خونمان نمک می پاشید 
و ما که خون مان را تکذیب کرده بودیم 
و خاک مان را تکذیب کرده بودیم 
مالیات رگ هایمان را ‌به پلیس گذرنامه پرداختیم‌
‌و‌ تن ‌مان را، تیزتر از ترکش ها، ترک کردیم 
!به خون برگرد  
!به پوستت  
که از حافظه تُهی ست 
به ردِ پولک های نقره ایت در جوی هایِ( تجریش ) 
!به زبان برگرد 
به خراش اش، با لبه ی تیز کاغذِ و نوک پستان
و سلول های سرکوب گرت را زبان بکش 
حیات برهنه ت را زبان بکش 
عفونتِ بیمارستانی الفبایت را زبان بکش
رد ماتیک بر تراشه ی معنا را زبان بکش
 استفراغ صورتی در کمپ های‌‌ مهاجرت را زبان بکش 
سرت را بکن توی شکمت، انسان نا مقدست را زبان بکش
فاکتورهای سوسیالیستی ات را زبان بکش
ساعت تنظیم شده به چهار جهت جغرافیایت را زبان بکش
انعکاس کارد بر تراش پولک هایت را زبان بکش
توارد کلمات دیگران در شعرهایت را زبان بکش 
قرارهای ملاقاتت با بانک، پرفکتور، وکیل حقوقی ات را زبان بکش
خونت را بر لبه ی سنگ توالت های عمومی زبان بکش
به خون برگرد 
که مُباح است و مبارک 
و‌‌ هیچ یک را به خاطر نیاور
به خاطر نیاور  
زیرا که لب ها شیوه ی خودشان را دارند برای فراموشی
یک پناهنده می‌داند که رُستِ گوشت های شکار لذیذتر ست 
 یک پناهنده چگونه بوسیده شدن را فراموش می‌کند 
و لبخندش از تاریکخانه ترسناک مرگ های فردی برمیخیزد 
هر چه فردی تر، عمومی تر 
این شعر را قبل از به خاک افتادنم باید میسرودم 
رنج های عمومی ام را با سنجاق به سینه ام آویختم 
 به مرد عرب گفتم رد داغ در ترقوه است که لمسش کرده ای
تنم را وطن نامیدم به مرد رومانیایی گفتم پولکِ های نقره ای گرمت نخواهند کرد  
او  نیزه اش را در حوضچه ی وسط میدان فرو برد  تا مادرش را از زخم بستر نجات دهد
و ما به آوند گیاهانِ ایتالیا آویزان بودیم
با دهان ماهی ها گفتم من حتی از مادرت ده بار بیشتر زاییده ام 
و در پوست خاکستری بی حافظه ام فرو رفتم 
و در زبان خاکستری بی حافظه ام  فرو رفتم 
باران بر تمام طبقه ها یکسان نمی بارید 
زنِ اوکراینی چترش را گشود 
و سیاه پوست ها در میدان رقصیدند 
عرب تبار ها در میدان رقصیدند 
و من‌ در پوست خاکستریم آنقدر فرو رفتم 
که خورشید از خلالِ خیابان ها برایم خون‌ آورد‌ 
و مرد از پشت میز اداره با لهجه ی رمانتیک فرانسوی زمزمه میکرد 
به خون برگرد 
… که مباح است و مبارک 

If you are a child of a refugee, you do not
sleep easily when they are crossing the sea
on small rafts and you know they can’t swim.
My father couldn’t swim either. He swam through
sorrow, though, and made it to the other side
on a ship, pitching his old clothes overboard
at landing, then tried to be happy, make a new life.
But something inside him was always paddling home,
clinging to anything that floated—a story, a food, or face.
They are the bravest people on earth right now,
don’t dare look down on them. Each mind a universe
swirling as many details as yours, as much love
for a humble place. Now the shirt is torn,
the sea too wide for comfort, and nowhere
to receive a letter for a very long time.

And if we can reach out a hand, we better.

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
"If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately."

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. "Help,"
said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him."

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Beheadings, slaughter of the innocents, suffering
and sorrow say all the stabbed, ecstatic art
of the museums and more of the same
says the news, the glowing, after glowing now
what, but also in the crowded galleries babies held
by mothers looking at babies being artfully held
in the celestial rain, the fat buttery ones, part putto,
part lard who appear ready to slip from mother’s arms
out of the frame into smoke and storm, the non-art part
of the world, that disobedient, expensive part
like a furious sea you paid to cross in an inflatable
plastic raft, a child’s toy in a bath it looks like
from America where we have no fate
we can’t make. Fate is guns and money
swamping the stars. Fate is the bewitched mixture
of fuel with sea water that incinerates the self.
Fate is the decree of childhood evaporating into
unauthorized space where the I/you is so much
questioning and answering non-art. In art
I see the gold leaf, the gashes, the beautiful throats
and hear the trauma arias of martyrdom
that are the same in non-art deserts and cities.
There are two schools: one that sings
the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments
and frankincense while the world dries
and the other voice like water that seeks
to saturate, erode, and boil. It can’t be handled.
It can’t be marble. It wants to pool and rise
and rain and soak the root systems. It ruins
everything you have ever saved.

                          for my ancestor
                          in the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry
                          aboard the Suwanee

First a penny-sized hole in the hull
                     then eager saltwater rushing over
    us and clouds swirling and clotting
            the moonlight—no time to stop and look upon it
as the hole becomes an iron mouth,
    makes strange sounds, peels and tears
                        open iron as iron should not open—

muffled and heavy         us becoming underwater
                     we confused the metal echo and thunder
         as the same death knell from God’s mouth—

we been done           floated all this way down 
           in dark blue used
      uniforms, how far from slavers’ dried-out fields
in Virginia, Pennsylvania—wherever

                                         we came from now we   
         barely and only
                    see and hear an ocean
                                        whipped into storm

not horror, not glory, but storm
                   not fear, not power, but focus
             on the work of breathing, living as the storm
rocks us and our insides upside down        turns
                   hard tack into empty nausea—

                 so close to death I thought I saw the blaze-
            sick fields of Berryville again, the curling fingers
                             of tobacco, hurt fruit and flower—
                      but no, but         no.

             I say no to death now. I’m nobody’s slave
                                    now. I’m alive     and not alone,
one of those      who escaped and made    myself
                 a soldier a weapon a stone in David’s sling
       riding the air above the deep. I grow more dangerous
to those who want me. I ain’t going back
                                 to anywhere I been before.

                 I grab a bucket. You grab a bucket. We the 25th
       Pennsylvania Colored Infantry, newly formed
                            and too alive and close to free
          to sink below this midnight water. 36 hours—chaos
shoveling-lifting-throwing       ocean back into ocean
                         to reach land and war in the Carolinas. 

       I stole my body back       from death and going down
                        more than once. I steal my breath
           tonight and every night      I will not drown. 

^{after Marie Howe}

Last night, the boy—
                                   you’ve already grieved—crawls 
                                        
                  through the window
                                                                  of who you once were
              & whispers,
                                              Listen. Listen.

                                    Ten years off heroin and he’s still here.

              You say no—not 
                                                            again—so it feels like a power
                                                            against your will
                                              holds the flame
                     under the bent spoon

    & pulls closer your last breath
                                                       of good sense.

        A sweet sweet hum begins                                   as he stops
           
the constellation bleeding                    from the pale crook

      of your arm with a kiss
                                                knowing you would oblige this
        oblivion                           this strange song

            growing loud & lovely               louder & lovelier

til’ you’re nothing
                                    but the warmth
                                                                  of life’s slippery goodnight—
         hovering above yourself
                                                            you find the boy splashing
                through puddles,
                                                        it’s charming the way he calls you
          to the edge—
                                 Again! he says, taking your hand,
                                                                                                  but you beg him to stop.    

^{for Maya}

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

^{(for Maje Adams)}

When given the opportunity to connect with  
No  
To be welcomed back into your  
Home  
No  
Family? 
Do you take it? 
// 
You reached out your hand and I took it. It felt too good —I pull away almost immediately 
I look behind me seeing the ash of my life I burned  
and I begin to cry 
Through the tears I see you next to me  
Still here  
Still—
Here  
Tears tear through my body and we sit down on the bench. You hold me close  
Rest here as long as you need, im here and im not leaving, but you need me to promise that you
will not go back. You made it too far
Everything in my body says to turn back to the life I knew.  
I look deep into your eyes, and my voice shakes as I whisper ok, I promise  
You do not let go as I watch the life I thought I knew disappear before my eyes.

It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman,
that we should reach you, Hunter!
Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with a bit of Washington and a bit of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
You are the future invader
the naive America who has Indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are clever, you oppose Tolstoy.
And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alejandro Nebuchadnezzar.
(You’re a professor of energy,
as today’s madmen say.)
You think life is fire,
that progress is eruption;
where you put your bullet
you put the future.

No.

The United States is strong and big.
When it shakes there is a deep tremor
through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, you hear the roar of the lion.
Hugo said to Grant: “The stars are yours.”
(Just shining, rising, Argentine sun
and the Chilean star rises ...) You’re rich.
Join Hercules’ cult to Mammon’s;
and lighting the path to easy conquest,
Liberty raises her torch in New York.

But our America, which had poets
from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl,
you have saved in the footsteps of the great feet of Bacchus
panic in the alphabet learned a while;
who consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis,
whose name comes to resonate in Plato
Since the ancient times of your life
living light, fire, perfume, love,
America’s great Montezuma, from the Inca,
redolent of America by Christopher Columbus
Catholic American, Spanish American,
The America where noble Cuahtemoc said:
“I’m not a bed of roses” that America
trembles in hurricanes and lives in Love,
men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul lives.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates, and is the daughter of the Sun
Be careful. Live the American Spanish!
There are thousand of puppies loose Leon Spanish.
Be required, Roosevelt, being God himself,
Rifleman the terrible and strong Hunter,
order to keep us in your tight grip.

And, You may count it all, missing one thing: God!

In Nicaragua, my Nicaragua, 
    What can you buy for a penny there?—
A basketful of apricots, 
    A water jug of earthenware, 
A rosary of coral beads
    And a priest’s prayer. 

And for two pennies? For two new pennies?—
    The strangest music ever heard
All from the brittle little throat
    Of a clay bird, 
And, for good measure, we will give you
    A patriot’s word. 

And for a nickel? A bright white nickel?—
    It’s lots of land a man can buy,
A golden mine that’s long and deep,
    A forest growing high, 
And a little house with a red roof
    And a river passing by. 

But for your dollar, your dirty dollar, 
    Your greenish leprosy, 
It’s only hatred you shall get
    From all my folks and me;
So keep your dollar where it belongs 
    And let us be!

                       The cool light turns
everything gray—my fingers settle

in the grass. Wingless cicadas sleep
beneath leaves curling like ribbons

Now is the time to feel alive. Clouds
rear back until light is the holy word

The grass blades under me come to
patterns of rest. Pendulous branches

and fibrous bark make a crown. If
I cannot be a mother I still want no

life but this one pocket of air rising
through the water like a rosary bead

I pray to a God who keeps me here
Soft light from the foliage shatters

I can give up happiness. I’ll go bury
my dreams first thing in the morning

I love these lanterns not for their meaning
But for the bright colors they still give
when I close my eyes
scenes from a strip mall childhood
Grocery store errands in my Catholic school uniform 
Drive-thru’s at McDonalds with Christmas on the radio 
Nine-day novenas leading up to Simbang Gabi
and afterward the long awaited Noche Buena 
with a shiny lechon in the center of a hall 
filled with a hungry diaspora
when there used to be more rain
in those Decembers 
I love these lanterns
for other reasons unknown
for the history of this particular star
is filled with tears
It’s hard to understand 
why certain artifacts and relics 
Call to you
If it’s a desire for meaning
when it’s hard to find stars in this daily sky
And so you look them up 
Like stickers imprinted in your mind
And in this fragmented search about the paról
There is the story of Bethlehem
which is the same story of the migrant
Searching for a home
Fleeing homes
Losing homes from floods, fires, wars, capitalism 
It’s the same story about the rulers
who produce the stars we believe in
who own the clearest skies to see them
And never mind the rulers created the myth
The poet owns the memory

^{translated from the Russian by Your Language My Ear
S}

**

The angle is too wide. It’s really an angle, not a cone. I keep slipping down over and over. But—I catch on the vertices. I hang like a piece of seaweed at the periphery of the gaze.
It’s the same story with the tables. It always amazed me how nothing falls off them in his work, and now it’s like I can understand the utter despair of these victuals. I’ve also fused into place—at a 25-degree angle. You can’t pick me up or drop me. But I’d like to slide off already, into the hungry rustle of antennae, to the local partisans’ camp.
I lie at my quiet angle facing the cobalt contour and am afraid to touch it. I don’t know what unfathomable geometry preserves it. At one point I studied Italian but now all I can muster is an oily magari. It has to do with the relationship between what’s alive and what’s salty.

**

These figures are annoying when they’re the first to fall. They form predictable vacuums. There are two of them here. And also, in the shape of a small square, a spot of color—F. I have a hunch they named her in honor of an unsuccessful dancer, but I’d like to think otherwise. It always seemed to me that those splotches of his had a lot of, not passion, but love. They break apart the bedroom scene, let the paint run down and abandon the hopeless composition. In the awkward dubstep undertaken by F there’s a similar generosity. She pins my legs and gives my doomed hands a soft task.
Tears, fisticuffs, the ritual sacrifice of round birds. Their fall happens at too great a distance to divine anything from the asphalt remains. Now I can’t turn my head, I watch the handless clock, and time settles in a stiffening vertebra like salt.
In two days we’ll go to the factory to flirt with the specters of labor. I will crown myself with the thorny wreath of inaction, slash open my hand, and that stillborn chick we couldn’t see from the balcony will ooze out, rise up from my blood. You’ll blow on it and my wound will acquire the gift of sight.

**

The metaphor is as old and precise as the devil. I want to be the text, you want to be the image. Fucking gender. You don’t want to be looked at. I am trying to become illegible. Fucking gender. One day we will be like angels. Composed of a single contour. Meanwhile, I watch the ink fill in your body.

Контур

**

Угол слишком широк. Это – именно угол, не конус. Я вновь и вновь проскакиваю вниз. Но – цепляюсь за стрелки. Вишу водорослью на периферии взгляда.
Та же история со столами. Я всегда удивлялся, как у него с них ничего не падает, а сейчас будто бы понимаю невозможное отчаяние этих продуктов. Я так же врос – под углом в 25 градусов. Меня ни возьмешь, ни уронишь. А хотелось бы уже скатиться – в голодный шелест усиков, в лагерь к местным партизанам.
Я лежу под тихим углом к кобальтовому контуру, и боюсь к нему прикасаться. Не знаю, что за бездонная геометрия его хранит. Когда-то я учил итальянский, но сейчас все что могу вымолвить – промасленное magari. Оно касается отношений живого и соленого.
 
**

Эти фигуры раздражают, когда падают первыми. Образуют заведомые пустоты. Здесь таких две. И еще – небольшим квадратом, пятном краски – Ф. Я догадываюсь, ее назвали в честь неудавшейся танцовщицы, но хочу думать иначе.
Мне всегда казалось, в этих его пятнах много не страсти, но любви. Они разламывают сцену постели, дают краске сбежать, покинуть безнадежную композицию. В нелепом дабстепе, затеянном Ф., есть схожая щедрость. Она блокирует мои ноги и дает мягкое дело обреченным рукам.

Слезы, драка, жертвоприношение круглых птиц. Слишком далекое их падение, чтобы выгадать хоть что-то по асфальтным останкам. Теперь я не могу повернуть голову, смотрю в циферблат без стрелок, и время откладывается солью в каменеющем позвонке.
Через два дня мы пойдем на завод, кокетничать с призраками труда. Я короную себя терновым венцом бездействия, рассеку руку, и тот, не видимый нам с балкона, мертворожденный цыпленок вытечет, проступит из моей крови. Ты подуешь на него, и моя рана получит зрение.
 
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Метафора стара и точна как черт. Я хочу стать текстом, ты хочешь стать изображением. Ебаный гендер.
Ты не хочешь, чтобы на тебя смотрели. Я пытаюсь стать нечитаемым. Ебаный гендер.
Однажды мы будем как ангелы. Состоять из одного только контура.
Пока я смотрю, как чернила заполняют твое тело.