LOVE IS RESISTANCE

Judas Goat, Gabrielle Bates

i went out to hear by Leila Chatti

i’m not faking my astonishment, honest by Paige Lewis

— Traci Brimhall, “Crime and Punishment” from Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod

Omar Sakr, The Lost Arabs

[Transcript:

This Is Not Meant for You

I tore this page from somebody else's book. It was written in Arabic so I found a man to lend me his tongue. Left the page splotched with his thickness & the following words: this was never meant for you. Your grandfather made that choice & you live with the ashes of it black on your teeth. The Uber driver asked me where the local mosque was real casual like he didn't already know I had it folded up in a square & carried it everywhere. It was one of those nondescript places with a plaque, the kind you need to get close to read the inscription: this is not meant for you. I tried once to swallow a prayerful palace but got gum stuck on minarets—these stones can't be hidden in a body. Everyone knows where they are. The driver releases me onto Sydney Road, a replica of home, all the Leb bread, smoke, & men. I try not to see my father in them but he is there no matter where I look, laughing with the ease of a man never pierced by a minaret. In each gaping mouth I witness an old disaster, a rank tooth, a cavity holding captive my name. I kneel by the circle of my almost-fathers not in worship but to listen to what they have folded in their pockets: a language a sea a boy never kissed a son never loved a country that wasn't meant for them but which they carry everywhere.

]

Carl Phillips, "Fixed Shadow, Moving Water", Then the War: New and Selected Poems [ID'd]

Maggie Dietz, "November" [ID in alt text]

calling a wolf a wolf (inpatient) by Kaveh Akbar

Hamed Sinno

[ID: Black text on a white background. It reads:

"Resentments: Community Guidelines for Twitter Poetry

at the beirut port

at the beirut port i took

a ship to haifa.

at the beirut port i took a ship to haifa to meet a boy i had been talking to ever since i was twenty two and those were the last days of myspace and he sent me a picture of himself in bed reading friedrich engels in a tuxedo because he liked my lyrics and i met his parents and they didn't like me much because they said i spoke too much and i fought too much about too much with too much intensity, but that was fine and everything was fine and everything was a little boring sometimes and we went to the beach and then there was sand in my ears and sand in my butt while we walked around the market to buy kites but instead i spent all the money on cheap candy that didn't taste like much other than sugar because even the candy was a little boring and then at night we drove to a gay bar in ramallah and then i played some songs and read some poems and made enough money to cover the cost of the trip and a year later his parents had warmed up to me because they liked the way i cooked my moloukhieh and they drove up to beirut to meet my mother and ask her for my hand for their son and the wedding was a modest little affair and we prayed in al aqsa and the carpets smelled like feet and nobody stole our slippers and then we drank jallab in a little coffee shop close by and because i am that expat, the scent of jasmine was so heavy that i felt i could stick my hand and pluck it out of the air and it was the 14th of june and sarah flew over from cairo to join us and she went fishing and came back with dinner and my uncles shot some rounds in the sky to celebrate and no one panicked and we made a life for ourselves between beirut and haifa and it didn't hurt to breathe at eid el fitr and it didn't hurt to breathe at christmas and it didn't hurt to breathe at pride

and i never left

because there was never a

reason to leave and."

/End description.]

and now it's october by Barbara Crooker

"One mind trying to envision everything that could happen, everything that could go wrong, everything that one ship of humans could ever need to say to another. There is something tender about the tendency toward thoroughness. And then something grave about how the language effloresces, absurdly, into such dark specificity."

what's the opposite of feeling sand slip through your fingers because I feel this poem more and more as time passes

This translation is by Dr. Eileen Chengyin Chow (and my favorite for sure!)

song for autumn by mary oliver