Epilogue as Preface
Suppose the nightmare happens
your library on fire pages burning commas ashed
suppose the shrapnel the haze
suppose it is the last day and there isn’t a shelf to lean on
what remains?
not the buildings and billboards
the spice jars the whisky that never spoils
not an olive or an orange not our mouths and names
not doom or this moment
only memory
barely an image colour of the sea a deepest blue
your voice which is mine and smiling
I almost hear it it is telling me to cross—
Desire
Mulberries explode in my fingers,
purple is the name of my God,
God is July in the mountains,
mountains are the colour of a lover’s eyes:
greyish brown in February, green in May.
May and a woman is crossing Hamra,
prosecco a clutch in her arms.
Another woman touching my hair
on the red couch. The red couch,
all the nights it supervises.
Nothing comes close to Beirut in October,
chairs in the sun, heat breaking like weeks,
slow and inevitable. On Gemmayze’s stairs
a man reads a terrible song,
says his hands are tied, tired of running:
it is the sting of August when he flees.
The months are impermanent like a gaze,
come December I fling my body into fairy lights
zigzagging a tree. Swallow the city like a seed.
This is how I repay my debts, how I plead guilty.
On Karantina’s rooftop, a man says listen,
can you touch this nightmare?
All year I chase midnight
through corners and into dawn.
Passengers
After the ceasefire, on the flight to Beirut
I’m not religious, no,
not even sure about spirituality,
but when the plane rises,
each time it lands,
I have this sense of indebtedness—
or is it gratitude?
I whisper the words
my mother whispered:
in the name of God.
Everything rests on this flight,
though the babies continue to wail.
Of course there’s fear.
We’re alive.
There’s much to lose.
Look at the sky, how endless,
and the breath carrying us through:
we’ve come from somewhere,
and we’re going somewhere too.
Hamra
The bakery opens.
Bread rises like lungs.
I know this neighbourhood
the way one recalls a dream:
blue-eyed cats and rubber tree.
I tell the hairdresser,
it’s time for a chop,
which means I want to love again.
He says to return later
so I walk to the sea’s blue mouth,
its yellow forehead,
this haze of pollution.
Such determined generators.
What keeps us awake?
Bread and blade.
This machine of ordinary beauty.
Years Ago
Your grandmother’s rooftop pool.
Soda cans sweating like thighs.
Everywhere we looked,
another rubber tree rambling.
Where were we?
Motherhood, yes, if it was for us.
The August stink hovered like flies.
I watched you swim and wondered
if we’d be dancers someday.
At night you dipped a brush into watercolours
to attempt a bougainvillea:
fuchsia and flowering like gowns.
Then, a lemon.
Then a basket of lemons with perfect little leaves.
Oh what a long summer. What happy girls.
Today I threw out my lemons, mould-green,
and all afternoon I sat silent. I thought of us.
How we’re not dancers, or mothers,
or underwater. Yes we’ve come out for air,
and the sky is yellow as a decade.
This Old War, Again
A Found Poem After Etel Adnan’s “Sitt Marie Rose”
My spine is like a
twisted, stunted,
fallen tree,
disappearing.
I go out on the balcony.
The birds return.
The port burns.
I read the eulogy
for the anonymous
and the known.
Beirut is a port.
It glitters
on the asphalt.
When it rains
it’s the same,
the roots of a tree
split open.
To discover a truth
is to discover
a fundamental limit.
Time is dead.
I have no illusions.
I want to say
forever and ever
that the sea is beautiful.
Life Force in Seville
You feed me olives in the old city. Yes, love is a sort of blindness,
but here on this walk, I notice everything—bougainvillea,
river the color of wine, a cathedral outgrowing minarets—
not because we’re awake but because we share this field.
Look at the boys disappear into moonlight. Kiss my eyelids. Hold my chin.
Tomorrow, Granada. Tomorrow, beers and espresso and sangria.
It won’t matter. Read me a paragraph, I never finished Crime and Punishment.
“The whole question here is am I a monster, or a victim myself?”
I’m tired of walking. You teach me we don’t have to answer:
we’ve crossed the river three times already.
Something about instinct is so authoritarian.
I mean, why you? (Because there is a boat, and another river).
You laugh. Our language: an interrupted dream.
I mean there is no God but God, and we come from the same ruins.
Tell me where albaricoque comes from, and naranja.
A history of apricot trees under your window,
your family’s Sunday ritual of fresh orange juice.
Imagine we lived three decades without hearing each other,
and now, on our last night, we see a Flamenco show. Two women,
hands like arrows, digging through ground with a song.
Such sorrow. Why are you crying?
Because the dancers are so beautiful and we’ll never find them again.
Because how else to describe this? We were found. We hadn’t been looking.
Photograph
Friends on grass, toes itching.
It is warm and Sunday.
They’ve known each other for years,
so what is unsaid is still captured.
Their mouths half-open, one of them asks,
Why are we still here?
To laugh, another says.
That is the general agreement
on that afternoon
where the sea is beastly blue.
You can’t see in the picture but flies buzz.
Ants crawl and a white butterfly flaps
above shoulders, a great omen.
Clouds like birds. Birds like wind.
This city forces a love of disappearing things:
all these fences and wires,
rubber trees replaced with parking lots.
Even the birds will soon flock elsewhere.
But before they share fruits and fish,
and a frame. This sweet breath.
It is September and they want to stay alive.
Foresight
For months we wake up beside
each other. Both of us a little sad
unable to name what it is we forget.
You chop the parsley slowly,
marinate the meat in seven spices.
I learn without watching. I know
your shoulders hurt, your wrists
and lower back, and I want to be
a better daughter, pound the garlic
and carry your plastic bags
but you forgive me even before
I need you to. At night
I take you to see a play.
We sit at the back, giggling
like girls ecstatic to be friends.
On the way home it is dark and damp,
the lump in my throat sudden like fever.
To be born is to part you,
for the first time.
How else to say?
Mama I want to hold you,
to be held by you—forever.
