So Wanting in Arabic, the first edition, came out in 2002.
And these poems were written in the context
of a wish for something that I, at the time,
jokingly called "Queerarabia," written between, I guess,
the first Gulf War and the second,
in the shadow of the First Gulf War
and in the anticipation of the second.
And they're about finding queer Arabs,
and not having had that before, and also knowing
a revivified Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment
happening in myriad ways in the world around me
and not knowing how to hold that utopic queer
possibility and that geopolitical fact in tandem.
So "from her home, wander loves uncanny, away, you.
Is it past?
Whose to tear memory away, you?
Stolen upon thought, I'll not see the end of this.
Ya aa'yni, turn your gaze away from me, you.
A girl's hand may stop unexpected bleeding
over what rest was, eye to eye between away,
you, fall mistaking what looks she tosses for salvation.
Beware of such boasts, what they give too freely away, you.
Unhinge the doors with talk of children, your double war.
Send memories, limbs, flailing.
Who cast peace away?
You?
Hear the sound of rain on hotel window,
so stark it bleeds like waking, like Hitchcock,
blinds so low it's too dark to read.
Hear the train breaking, haunts further out.
The frame broke hours ago.
What are Effrit to make Twin Towers glow, too dark to read?
Disfigured, losing specific dimensions,
failing in their finitude.
What world is mirrored, too dark to read, as fireworks
roaming compulsive?
The mind makes interior what was your house or tomb, charred
terribly, too dark to read.
There your girl becomes pursuit, embers a route
more circuitous, her elliptical and fraying parabola.
Too dark to read, such hyperbole of desire.
Fire returns void in its avoidance.
Brute motor repetition writes parables too dark to read.
Into the wild, some cliche of the wild.
It's not the war we flee, north from Toronto.
That year, we're not at war, gone to cottage
like white folks.
Composed queer idylls break our fast at the colonial,
stock up at Nassr, say that's not war.
With our weight in lebne, mint, parsley, burgle, beans for ful,
lamb for kibeh.
We beg no guarantee of country.
Anything but war until the third bottle of wine
allows someone to ask if, in Lebanon, I am that man,
if not that war my father wanted.
You want to know what bargains with snow will I make.
Were my cousins not in that war, would I
not have been with them at Sabra, at Shatilla?
Naive to the war, I break all our glasses,
this ghazal's form, smiling.
In the commons, we give up on speaking,
fall quiet, cast looks to the mountains.
From the pool, all's quiet, more to hold us than memory
or will allow.
Lying by in glassed-off heat, we listen past falls quiet.
Whispers crackle.
Jammed radios abandon as mute, Iraq's young succumb
to deserts we let fall, quiet, as when
we slump into the sauna, genitals swaddled, white cotton
shrouds.
All eyes avert, quietly appalled.
Afraid to see my breasts, yours, to site black dick.
In the North Country, we feel what
they fear, the weight of whiteness, falling, quiet.