Ars Poetica I

After the last martyr has been laid to rest, after the country is
unearthed and the world is aflame, once the rubble has settled
and is all that remains, piercing into the Arab eye after
incomprehensible destruction and stubborn imperially-inherited
nationalistic agendas what does the diasporic witness have to
offer? What do we build in a rupture the size of countries, in
the imprints of a people and their stories? What do we build
with if not with words, if not my body? I am history and future,
legacy and premonition. Etched under my right palm and right
wrist alone I boast the stories of a thousand people. Under my
tongue, the whole universe and what came before language.
Silly world, killing kin and martyring the tongue! As though
death is obsolete. As though we ever die.

Ars Poetica II

My father sends me screenshots of weather alerts in New York
whenever it rains, snows, or whenever there’s wind. Take care
ya Totos. There are termites in my walls. There are one, two,
three, four mud tunnels. The termites swarm. I stay up all night
googling facts about termites. What is the spiritual meaning of
a termite infestation in your apartment? I hope to find a
silver-lining, something or anything to make me see the beauty,
some rest, a calmness. They work fast and build together. This
is not a spiritual meaning. This is how termites are. My best
friend entertains me. We are building a movement, a
community! One hundred thousand Palestinians have been
killed, injured, or under the rubble still by way of a U.S. funded
and backed Israeli zionist genocidal project. I march. I scream.
I weep. I outreach. I organize. I write. Sometimes I am lonely. I
feel very far away. Far from what I am not sure anymore. I
write. What else? There is a second life promised by way of
language. Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence tells
me so. I am not sure what I am trying to do or say. Words
cannot bring back the dead, the killed. I keep writing. The
exterminator tells me that termites are part of the ant family. In
the basement of my apartment, I watch the termites narrate the
land. The dust collects itself. The rain erases.^[1]
.

1. After Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence.