^{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.

A collard is a cabbage that does not develop a heart.

Their green leaves are like hands 
about to clasp in solemn devotion, 
arching towards the sun for a blessing.

My father sleeps in his grave.

And the collard greens he planted 
keep growing in his autumn garden.
The frost sweetens them
and the time comes to reap what dead
hands have sown. My brother cuts 
the green hands from the earth’s body.
the green prayers do not leave the black earth.

But here we are. At the table with turkey
and stuffing. Clasping our hands over 
his greens drenched in hamhock juice. 

We eat prayers. 

This we do in remembrance of him.
Take. Eat. His love
grown for you and me.

ט

There’s nothing the plague dead did that we
didn’t do. We gave our unprotected bodies
to strangers too—before we met & burned
each other’s initials into our arms. Black ink
& ash smudge, foreheads anointed the day
of fasting. Neither of us knows why
he deserved to survive, the virus
a hummingbird hovering above
the flower’s stamen before gliding off
to another bloom. On Granville Island
I, ghost, took you, ghost, to be my lawful—
my body still craving to be broken into
like a window; yours the rock that smashes.

the slight angling up of the forehead
neck extension                        quick jut of chin

meeting the strangers’ eyes
a gilded curtsy to the sunfill in another

in yourself      tithe of respect
in an early version the copy editor deleted

the word “head” from the title
the copy editor says              it’s implied

the copy editor means well
the copy editor means

she is only fluent in one language of gestures
i do not explain                     i feel sad for her

limited understanding of greetings              & maybe
this is why my acknowledgements are so long;

didn’t we learn this early?
            to look at white spaces

            & find the color       
            thank god o thank god for

                                                             you               
                                                                                        are here.

1.  
Now that I can, I am afraid to become a citizen.
I don’t want to become anything because I’m afraid of being seen. 

I am arriving, and departing, 
and later I will punish myself for looking over 
at the person sitting next to me on the plane, checking their screen 
and reading their email. For now there is no punishment.
Today I have realized everyone is just as boring as me. 
Everyone in TSA had enormous hands. 
I still refuse to travel with my green card.


2. 
It is my mother’s birthday and I bought her merchandise from a school 
I didn’t attend but only visited. She, too, understands the value of cultural capital.  

Today I am wounded. I like to say wounded instead of sad. Sadness is reserved
for days when I can actually make money from what I do. 
My mother raised me to make sure nothing I ever did I did for free. 


3.
When I land, Northern California is burning. 
We keep a suitcase near the door just in case.  
A man calls me three different names before giving up
and asks if my son has begun coughing yet.  
Beneath all that ash, no one seems bothered if you cry in public. 

Sitting around a circle of grateful alcoholics, some of whom will leave 
the room towards a clear portrait of their ruin,
which can either mean they will or will never return, 
a man tells me I have been selfish, and I admit I have. 
Sometimes I want every goddamn piece of the pie. 
A woman pulls aside her mask to smoke and says 
she’s going to look up what temperature 
teeth begin to melt, the implication being that if teeth melted, 
they won’t be able to identify her parents who are still missing in Paradise.

When I pray, I don’t know who I am talking to yet.
I take the eucharist in my mouth for the first time 
since changing religions and it is not as holy as I imagined. 


4. 
How easy. How effortless. This breath. 
I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here. I want to say.
I wish things were simple, like taking just one drink
and not another, like not burning in a fire, 
like letting things be good without being holy.
I wouldn’t have to pretend to try
to resume the bounty of this blossom.  

^{translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman}

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Como Tú

Yo, como tú,
amo el amor, la vida, el dulce encanto
de las cosas, el paisaje
celeste de los días de enero.
También mi sangre bulle
y río por los ojos
que han conocido el brote de las lágrimas.
Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.
Y que mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sangre unánime
de los que luchan por la vida,
el amor,
las cosas,
el paisaje y el pan,
la poesía de todos.

A George Washington quarter was a cuarta. Two cuartas bought us una soda from a vending machine. We asked abuelito for a cuarta to play the video game console. No, he said, una peseta. No, una cuarta. Una peseta para la máquina. He called the console a machine. Like the machine (máchina) that dropped a cuarta for every six cans Mother put in. La máchina is what Father had us puchar across yardas on the weekends. At work we ate lonche. At school we ate lunch. At home we ate both. Queki was served on birthdays. It was bien gaucho to have your birthday skipped again. Skipiar was done to the unsolvable math problem, which was never attempted again. Half our time was spent on homework, the other half was spent wacheando TV. Wacha signaled you were about to do something impressive, but foolish, like a bike stunt. !Wáchale! is what your friends tell you when you nearly plow into them with your bike. A bike is a baika. Uncle Jesse peddled a baika to the grocery store to buy leche y cornflais. Leche, not tortillas, were heated in the microgüey. Un güey is a dude. Uncle Beto called more than two people “una bola de güeyes.” I secretly listened to the Beastie Boys in Uncle Beto’s troka because I could turn it up full blast.  Uncle Jesse peddles back from Queimar with two new plaid shirts. Dad’s returning from his trip to the dompe, where he left last week’s garbage. Mother’s fixing Spam sángüiches. Abuelito pulls from his pocket a peseta, but hands me a cuarta.

When I come home they rush to me, the flies, & would take me, they would take me in their small arms if I were smaller, so fly this way, that way in joy, they welcome me. They kiss my face one two, they say, Come in, come in. Sit at this table. Sit. They hold one hand inside the other & say, Eat. They share the food, sit close to me, sit. As I chew they touch my hair, they touch their hands to my crumbs, joining me. The rim of my cup on which they perch. The milky lake above which. They ask for a story: How does it begin? Before, I was a child, & so on. My story goes on too long. I only want to look into their faces. The old one sits still, I sit with it, but the others busy themselves now with work & after the hour which maybe to them is a week, a month, I sleep in the room between the open window & the kitchen, dreaming though I were the Sierra, though I were their long lost sister, they understand that when I wake I will have to go. One helps me with my coat, another rides my shoulder to the train. Come with me, come, I say. No, no, it says, & waits with me there the rest whistling, touching my hair, though maybe these are its last seconds on earth in the light in the air is this love, though it is little, my errand, & for so little I left my house again.