Zana’s Reviews > The Lost Arabs > Status Update

“In the evening, my father mistook me
for his father’s country. It is the day
of the republic’s birth and thus yours,
he said. He was off by a month.
Neither of us could believe so small
a span of hours separated
a boy from a nation.”

“Who was it that said you only write to the land
because the land cannot speak back?

They must not have been fluent in mountains
or an absence of certainty. I have prayed

every day in a language I know only in pieces. No wonder I have centuries of faith locked

in my hair and nails so long, so matted.
Mattered. I keep doing that. Bleeding

belief, spilling it onto mats and garden beds.”

‘Today
my aunty tells me, “You are not (Arab like)
us.” In Islam, in Lebanon, in Turkey,
in all my beginnings the mother is
erased, the earth destroyed by men
by machine by chance by design
& there are only the seeds of stars left
running from their own light’

“i asked
my aunty about the supernatural hush i felt & she said
the animals stand still in holy awe, they know the Day
of Judgment will fall on a Friday. & this is why neither
of us made a sound, why his fingers bruised my lips to
crush the gasping as one of us disappeared into the other,
why the park bristled with jungle knowing, the kind
with teeth, why it felt like the end of the world &
the beginning”

“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.”