^{For Julie Fay}

Tired of asparagus and aubergines,
tired of tomatoes, even tired of wine,
tired of the village in its niche between
the Causses and the Mediterranean,
she stays in bed, the window blanked, till noon,
then lights a cigarette, emerges from
the sunken twenty-three hours’ dark bedroom
into the sitting-room, coffee machine
humming, and, on lucky days, the sun
doing its best to be sustaining. Gloom
waits in the shadow. Yes, I’ve also seen
degenerescence in a wrinkled prune,
a wedge of mouldy bread, a chicken bone
—and she’s grabbed life back on the telephone.
  
I might seize life back from the telephone
when someone—what someone?—any someone,
not killing time, wants a conversation.
It’s cold. It’s raining. The vineyards need rain,
and apple, peach orchards, tomatoes, corn. . . .
I took my morning walk. I left my cane
at the grocer’s, hooked on a crate of clementines,
only remembered it walking between
the square and this street, so, went back again.
I thought for those five minutes that my spine
was redeemed, renewal, not decline.
No twinges, phantom swellings, inflammation.
Absence of constriction. Absence of pain.
A long walk in the sunlight toward the mountain.
  
A long walk in the sunlight toward the mountain
might be one more invented memory
(but I did walk there), or a fantasy
cobbled out of desire, some book, invention
and memory, still. Yes, it’s going to rain
again. Like an old woman in a story,
I feel it in my shoulders, my left knee—
a vague ache, numbness, nothing more certain
or defined. Swallows who’ve built their nests
under the roof tiles of the house across
the way, swoop, zigzag, perch, then disappear.
This street, like others, is a palimpsest,
not “mine,” but one of mine, how many years?
The smell of cigarette smoke wafts upstairs.
  
The smell of cigarette smoke wafts upstairs—
Awake, alert, the morning round the bend,
what do you say to your friend, as you watch your friend
give in to existential despair?
. . . I think on the roof terrace, in the glare
of just-past-noon. Nothing has happened
but coffee, weather (rainstorms), and unend-
ing conversations on a screen. Elsewhere
(again) he, she, London, Houston, Oslo,
Paris, which always healed me, till it stopped,
send news: books, travel, politics, explosion.
There’s war close by, though nobody I know
is in it—yet. The temperature dropped.
The clouds move, and I follow their motion.
  
The clouds move, and I follow their motion
out on the terrace, littered with laundry-frames
and clotheslines, parched plants, two geraniums
bravely in leaf. Birdshit. Green hose on
the ground. Black wrought iron chair, cushion that goes on
it, waterlogged now. Clouds overhead. Here comes
the storm. Thunder. A week of rain. It drums
on the skylight, splattering commotion.
Hailstorm. It has been “a cold spring.”
Julie’s daughter, an ocean away,
plus half a continent (grew up here), is filling
her in—the complexities of her twenties,
chores, choices, everyday possibility
cross-country drives, a boyfriend, other skies.
  
Cross-country drives with Julie, other skies
of other decades—Greenville to Tucson,
a campsite in a state park, on a mountain,
improvised food, insects, epiphanies
of southwest sunsets, and the backstories,
—all-American cliché—that we’d recount, in
earnest belief it had been ours to choose. On
the road from somewhere to elsewhere, worries
in duffle bag, car boot. I’d like to take
off now, across a valley, up and over
a mountain (the roads are good, and I’ve
good walking shoes). Conifers, a small lake,
birdsong. A fox? a squirrel? runs for cover,
Except, of course, I never learned to drive.
  
Except, of course, I never learned to drive—
I was eleven. Life changed. My father died.
My mother inconveniently went mad.
I got through high school and got out alive.
Some distant college might have seen me thrive,
(take driving lessons that I never had).
What didn’t happen’s heavily beside
the point. I’m old, arthritic, more gratified
by an alert and unimpeded Now,
walking up the school road, with a cane,
looking at mountains, with a bit of longing
for how I once walked, but walking every morning
and afternoon: church, buvette, stone house, bungalow,
buying asparagus, an aubergine. . . .

^{Three Palestinian Boys, Marwan, 1970}

Death is no equalizer

Nothing is equal in the eyes of—

In the gaze of—

In the Of

Where is the third beloved head

(It is where all of our heads go)

While they stand consequential as passports

(I have hurt myself within the borders of the page)

(I have done this so they may see me)

Where are their legs their feet

(Where the soil ends and the dream begins)

I have painted myself green and mottled

I have asked my body to crumple and rupture

In the desire pulling my eyes to the paint they remain

Unreachable unreached and unreaching they remain

Where do they belong?

(Never in the marketplace of nations)

(Never in the deleterious exchange of hands)

(Never in my pitiful abject sight)

(Never in my soft abject palms)

The torsos joined into a picket line

Fused like butter in the crumpled building’s dead refrigerator

Where am I to look at them this way

As though lying down for them

(Prostrate in the tall grass waiting to be discovered)

And my hands so pitiful and empty

The language of survival cold within my teeth

Whatever I am seeking it is nowhere

And whoever I wish to be is dead

(I should kiss each of their cheeks)

(I should kiss them)

(I should have kissed them)

I should not have been born

And where do they belong?

In the gentle abjection of the cactus spine a bird impaled upon it

In the blood leaking from the general’s eyes as he gurgles

In the survival language cracking my teeth to flee my mouth

In the folding and crumpling of my fingers as they break

(Are broken)

^{after Naomi Shihab Nye}

We on the sea cliff all
thrill at December’s licking
wind 

                        [[[call down a watery sky
                                    (a ritual) 
                        call on grasses stamped with Saturday shoes
                                    (a circle)
                        call up the kissing foam
                                    (a washing)
                        call to familia, mostly chosen,
                                                                        (a mending)]]]

and hover, for a time
in exquisite love.

My sister unfurls her golden kaftan, 
yokes our hearts’ zealous
champing

                        [[[calls upon the holy 
                                    (poetry)
                        calls upon our circle
                                    (familia)
                        calls upon our ancestors
                                    (saina)
                        calls upon the cosmos
                                                   (guma’)]]]
and sings

             It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness

The winter sky sings 

                        my brother’s proud trembling 
                        jaw, your father’s bursting
                        radiant heart.

And you, zaytun of my heart, i asagua-hu.
You wrapped in tales of tatreez, your mother’s thobe.

My dress is made of water 
and invisible feathers dipped 
in moonlight.

I sing
                        [[[Halla. New moon. Sinåhi. Hagu I pilån-hu.

                        Let us keep each other safe and soothed and seen. 
                        Let us be in each other’s eyes and minds and guts. 
                        Let us tend our twining love so that it spirals, ever upward, 
                        ever outward, ever toward our shared home. 

The osprey overhead clutches a plump
gulping fish, anoints us with i tåsi.

                        I promise to always to hold you with patience, humility, and
                                   compassion. 
                        I promise to honor you, your ancestors, and your homeland as I
                                   honor my own. 
                        I promise to never stop fighting, until we see freedom for our
                                   lands and people. 

                        Let us share our struggles, along with our joys. 
                        Let us share our pain, along with our bliss. 
                        Let us share everything, together, i guinaiya-ku, 
                        sa’ tåya’ åmot para man guaiguaiya fuera di mas guinaiya’. 

                                                                 (Because there is no medicine for being in
                                                                            love, except for more love.)]]]

^{What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.}

^{—Mahmoud Darwish, “To a Young Poet”}

Because I should’ve wrote
this years ago, I’m trifling crying.
So what my slow failure pass the
years
  & make me be crying.
[Tears were real.] So what in
Bethlehem I tried to push so
much against [what?] where the
Wall is checkpoint and weird. So
what
  My lonelier, sadder
blackeraches kept from me a
heard resonance true?] with the
land thought against my body, so
what.
  I arrived.^l

2. CHECKPOINT
  And have known some
privilege.²

3. CHECKPOINT
  And have seen some
freedom [what?]

4. CHECKPOINT
  I mean, I told myself
No, you shouldn’t compare
it—myself [Young Black America] 
to Palestine—no, I—

5. CHECKPOINT

  But I compared it, drew
that wound, leaned into a kind of
pity so new to me who—

6. CHECKPOINT
  —was so used to being all
base & bottom of the world; I
tried, but felt that distant,
thieving love dilate my eyes.

7.
  And I cried, softly.

8.
  So what I had not asked
for, did not want this. So what. I
thought Tears cheapened it,
sissy’d it. So what.
    But was a new privilege I
met as salt Slipped, downed and
furthered my face, an

     AMERICAN
                And then Black⁴
  privilege began to describe
  me. Imagine that! I was
  some doubler consciousness
  again,
  me watching four boys
swing their joy on an old
couch-on-wheels
  Before that Wall’s
forestalling future, so who
greeted them first was my tears;
they’re playing a game.

9.
  A song: Palestine keeps a
divided home, where Blackness
only roams.⁵

10.
  The tears! But panic I
could call a film for this frame
that’s guilt, the next is
friendship—Am I what in
Palestine?
  Or is it my “voice”
insisting the story, by certain
marks, in whisperings⁶—What do I
mean
  by Spirit?—of warring,
intifada, blood like Dew in the
fields ...
  The story is true.

11. THE WALL
—Killings are thrilling, the
Wall said, and casual:
  (1) little infant trying—;
  (2) women in their—;
  (3) dogs sleeping;
  (4) boys.
  —What do I mean by
Spirit?— The birth of a nation
means alway the death of a
former one.⁷

12.
Sitting here near ole Bayou
Road, again all spleen. The
Palestinian men I try with my
eyes stare back half-meanly; they
don’t know I know they know I’m
trans—but I am the lady, herself,
within. Fiercely her walk pierces
a New Orleans’ slick night.⁸

13. THE WALL
  But I was saying the birth
of a nation means always the
death of a second one.
  Israel is real, trifling, in
someone’s mind.

14. I felt that. I was
persuaded. The film pealing
across my eyes, only one
Palestine,
  Made protest against this
fact untenable, as if myself I
could see in those fields,
  Saw too the theft
and strangle of myself.

15. SOLIDARITY EXISTS
  What’s solid in
solidarity—All I know is still
nooses, crosses; still thorns—then
it was white phosphorus forming
the quick shadow of a boy called
Freedom—in whispering, in
curtains mark—I’m somehow a
distance from.
  Admission is a later
knowledge, I think. A right of
return.⁹

16.
  A slower knowledge. To know
it was my want to see
myself as that boy I was seeing,
that ache again and in myself to
be, blackerache, the one most
hurt.

17.
Admission is a graver knowledge, I think,
trick  privilege, instance when, tonight
Maryam reminds me,
  Recalled to just-that-where White
phosphorus is made.

“Arkansas, baby! oh, yeah—”
  I wonder if Palestine can be Black? A
Nigga be Filinistina?
  And creole twain.
“And it pass right thru”—peculiar—“that
Port of New Orleans.”
Orleans.”
  Can—¹⁰

18. CHECKPOINT
  —they keep a divided
home, where how Blackness only
roams?

18. CHECKPOINT
  Light slides across the face of a body.
Dark does.

19. CHECKPOINT
  The next shot is familiar:
  rows of cotton dipped in
historical red; burnt cork; crows¹¹;
rows of bullets ripped into some
resembling, slum skin, ache—
  But—

20. CHECKPOINT
  —Try again: they are
soldiers I am
seeing, Israeli, only
the present tense but I should’ve
said this years ago.
  I should’ve made this
article confession, spelled out
between poem and novel years
ago: tall lyric, a space of briar
ambition and its mess of all the
violences witnessed—

21.
  —and the beauty.
  I should loathe this
gravity, of those violences, these
easy collisions I make from item
to idea or like to like.
  But I love to like, to raise
the lyric analogy and have you
consume: the way an eye carries
down the page; down the shallow
energy of my head voice now;
because I bid it do, to the hilt—

22. SEMICOLON
  —to the silt. These built
up semicolons, the top dot like
the soldier’s rifle target, the comma
dangling for how the
dead do give pause, I should hate
it;
  I should spit, I should—

23. WANT
  —need the harder thinking¹²,
which is rigor gammed
with care, the possibility of that,
that’s all, unmannered, uneven—
  Like some New Orleanian
unique South, that occupies the
psychot of my brain’s desire,
words I worry into
existence.

24. FREEDOM BEGS
  Let’s say the freedom of
poetry can be the danger of it,
could be the draw? So what?
  Tried in Jerusalem; tried in
Hebron—
  But I saw everything I
needed to see in the labored
chain-work of the overhanging
canopy that keeps—those
whisperings, certain marks—rocks
from falling on the shopkeepers’
heads;
  Took a video of the Palestinian
man who said, “Go
back. Tell it.”¹³

25. Who wants a pacifying
gospel delivered knows I cannot
please them, knows I cannot
sincerely stop these telling tears.

26. NIGHT-WALKING WOMAN
  Yet I walk, eyes like a
lady’s reminded to my purpose
with truth. Palestine cries a divided
home, where Blackness
bedamned to roam, and we share a
Dome.
  Friend, look in my eyes.
To have no home is yet a
difference from the denial of
return, and don’t we both have
no home?
  Slavery is true; as
Occupation remains true; as a
sky cross-stitched and beaded
with turning danger is true:
Together our nights sing out 
their moan.¹⁴

27.
  I mean, I have not stopped
this ego rolled down my cheeks
and who asked for witness?¹⁵

28. WITNESS
  I first saw myself as the
shame I took fully for myself,
those years ago—
  But was written away from
it.

29.
  A free world, I think, is
possible. I am persuaded.
  I saw it in the
still-for-singing beauty of the
land, how Palestine makes a gold
hum in my mouth. Saw it in the
not-now-warring, rolling hills of
Ramallah my feet at least tried to
walk frankly in and felt—

30. CHECKPOINT
  —yes, a resonance. What
could I imagine now?

31. CHECKPOINT
  What new eyes could I
claim?

32. CHECKPOINT
  What must you admit,
really, to be free?¹⁸

33. CHECKPOINT
That I tried my complete
body landing it in that place,
Palestine.

34. CHECKPOINT
And was I wrong?

End Notes:

I first arrived in Palestine, thru the Jordan corridor, with the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2016, accompanied by such elites as J. M. Coetzee and Saidiya Hartman. Though Hartman, the only other Black American on the caravan, passed through easily, I was barred for an hour at the first checkpoint. How come?

Where I mention “doubler consciousness” I refer to W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of Black persons’ double consciousness, which keeps divided interests between Blackness and what he called “Americanness” (or whiteness) ever within the confines of Black life. Can there be more

Where I mention “slum,” see the aforementioned Saidiya Hartman and her expansive theory on the afterlives of slavery and their impact on what she calls the “Fungible body.” The slum, she theorizes, is where we find such marked bodies. But is that the only place?

I want to thank Sharif Abdul Koddous and all the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature; and Ru Freeman, John Hennessy, and Emily Everett for all their various help in (re)shaping and shepherding this poem toward its present form. But is it done?

And I thank the reader. Courage's is rarest Industry, it seems, if protest ...

¹They made us hide our books up in scattered bags and come thru the Jordan passage, where passage is no guarantee for apparently Palestinians, even bronzed-skinned Black U.S.-born me: where once I noticed the change of Clerk accounted for my Queue I knew I had chosen the wrong Queue. They have you line up in such before Passport deals with me without the gated glass partition, I can recall, tall behind each other, heavy in a line, await your turn; and who awaited me was a more-tanner Israeli woman, because Israel control the border and there is not two-stateliness in the West Bank as much as occupied territory controlled by an Enemy, or a Rival at least; she was much my elder and gave a Look of the Crone over a beaky nose, which immediately supported my Anxieties. Instead of the younger, cuter, whiter man Border officer I originally hand-picked back of the Queues, intuitively, she exited from a Door to the back and quickly replaced his seat, and hardly could I change lines before I stood: Next for interview.

²A nervous, electric, ridiculous privilege pushed me forward in the queue that, if it were any where else, would feel tedious; there’d be no cause for any poem, any introspection. Still I expected to pass inevitably thru the Border; wasn’t I American after all? if shy? who those presenting organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature had invited to Palestine? I was 27 years then, shuffling alongside impressive company—the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, the poetic theorist Saidiya Hartman, among others in our caravan, the bookseller Sarah McNally, all of us differently ‘citizened,’ few of us Palestinian.

They’d read in Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron. I’d read in Jerusalem. Back then I still presented male and my hair swept back, flat-ironed straight, was dyed so that it blew in any breeze auburnly, if cool autumn’s blonde color, and down just to my shoulders. But in queue I stand with it all pulled back and wrapped neatly in a sort of ‘boy’s bun.’ Memory begs me tell you these details as if these are the details that matter. So, the South African, the black American, the Canadian passport-holders eased their respect gates. I’m next. I await my interview.

³Let me describe one as what one encounters at a National airport’s Transport Security Administration gate with its expected Queues thru metal and infrared detectors, bag scans, and inevitable body pats, invasive as much for Cis as Trans fliers whose Body, up to hair, invite special scrutiny; this, combined with that more basic metal turnstiles and cattle prodded revolving gate New York subways are famous for, if kids sometime jump them. But imagine this theatre repeating not just at the country border you don’t operate, but between each city of your country and even between each open zones of a give militarized city, Hebron and Nablus being the most heavily patrolled my own eyes would see, patrolled by Israeli conscripted soldiers some my age or younger, some (always last in line) darker, Ethiopic-darker than me. Checkpoints ergo repeating this lyric.

⁴To say that I realized what American privileges I enjoyed, separate and apart from or if they including the experience of being my color my presentiom of the Black male me, is an understatement. But I forget to tell you about my treatment at the Jordan Border, which did not go to plan. Crone at the desk, she may have been anyone’s grandmother, urged her questions methodically. Who have I come to visit or what will I see? What work am I in? Why company? Oh, you have written? What have you written? Who are your publishers? What is your name again? Watch my eyes. Tell me your father’s name? But here I stutter, breaking sweat a bit despite answering each honestly. Everything not to say which Festival invited us, we were so instructed to scattered among many Queues and say nothing about Palestine. We weren’t instructed to deny our True History and, being Black, that includes having no father as parent. I’m told her so. I said, I didn’t know my father or Had none. She was done. Please step out the Line and wait to the Back, and I wasn’t alone there.

⁵In the Back of Queues everyone Arab and American me stand and are told wait, some of us to be further interrogated, for fact we’re suspicious and some say that meaning Brown and we do wait for hours. All this time everyone else, lighter-skinned or white, or with First World passport’s privilege, including Saidiya, await us other side the border. But Sarah McNally’s crying just for confusion about me. “I don’t get it,” she says, she can go back and forth the border, “But you have an American passport!” And I do; I wait. Whose novel is read from our last night reading in Ramallah, a Palestinian author is remaindered back; can’t cross; hasn’t the right to return to Gaza, his own home. Must go the long flight back to London or so, mourner. His name is ____.

⁶Suffice to say the language of the poem might be better explained for two ways; (1) reticence was my odd engine, so much so that (2) I began these thoughts following the erasure I designed over a short critical review of the very recently released film Birth of a Nation, whose top-billing star had just weeks before fallen from grace as it was not yet Dawn of the Canceling Culture; he was dragged.

⁷Only the women I imagined all else I saw truly, crying because I hadn’t expected the pit of my sympathy to grow more bowel. You see the floor of all horrible social treatments had always sat below what I used to call “the ghetto,” Saidiya’s calls “the slum.” I expected always is the case Abject and Most Wretched are Black Peoppe on Earth, yet what I saw there yes took that Thought. Added Palestinian to the roster, so that I could a first time see myself truly “American,” white like that.

if the word for this is   Palestine
this love    this steadfastness

if this word becomes     again
unutterable    unspeakable

if this word   Palestine   disappears
if this work      of being

If a word, a life, the life
of a people      of a land

is taken    disappeared
    stolen            between 
    
the time   starved for months,
              of this poem

denied food            
   its writing      and

without   water  and the now 
    medicine
      
         of your     years 
  under siege   reading

living in rubble  
      you are reading it

a reign of bombs 
                        now    

dying in rubble
  what then

what then?
  what will we do?
           
    you 
I           who?
   
 will anyone    make it stop?
bring it  them!  back?    home?

this word  this land   this people
if the word for this is 

 Palestine   
it is          genocide

You were right
Your words are still wings of light
always carrying you to us
sometimes carrying us to you

Your name is a green tattoo
on Baghdad’s tired face
Your street the forehead
of a body beheaded every morning

Just another chapter
in the saga of blood and ink
you knew so well

I cannot lie to you
I’m quite pessimistic
we are still etching
the walls of this cave
thousands of years long

with signs we keep reinterpreting
and myths about a future world
where we don’t devour one another
where the sun is friendly
and the seas cannot inherit our fever

Some are digging
a deeper grave
about to embrace us all
they, too, have their engravings,
maps, philosophers, and books

We can only keep dreaming
of a shore for the wind
and dig wells
in the dark
with fingernails of silence and solitude
we will weave an ocean out of ink
for our myths
and out of words a sail
or a shroud
vast enough for all.

Every book is a well
around which we sit
drinking to your health
trying to live
as you did
with death and after it

Al-Mutanabbi (10th century) was one of the greatest classical Arab poets. Al-Mutanabbi Street, in the heart of old Baghdad, is the cultural center of the city with tens of bookshops and stalls and the famous Shahbandar café where the literati congregated every Friday. On March 5th 2007, a bomb exploded, killing twenty-six civilians and destroying many of the bookshops.

^{After Edward Said}

Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.

Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.

Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.

Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.

Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.

Every empire sings itself a lullaby.

At the border, a flock of journalists. 
A sacrifice of tires burned behind us. 
Beneath the picnic tents, a funeral of families. 
What else will we become in Gaza if we gather, 
if we carry our voices to the razored edge? 
We were met by a gallop of prayers, 
clamoring recitatives puncturing the shroud
of humid air. We were met by a delirium

of greetings, peace-be-upon-us surreal 
between embraces, the horizon locked 
and loaded. What is upon us 
will require mercy. Let the plural be
a return of us. A carnage of blessings—
bodies freed from broken promises, 
from the incumbrances of waiting.