All My Life’s Been a Costume Party
The night was like a planet turning on its axis—
tides shifting in some seamless, unnoticeable way.
So long as I have to go on with this existing
I might as well be irresistible, so
buzzing, I took him
like a small cactus fruit into my mouth.
I can be this whole tequila bar
or that blonde over there
in a cropped t-shirt shooting stardust through the gap
in her teeth. There she is kissing her lady’s midnight
hair. And there in the crowd, a man is leaning in
and saying something no one will remember.
Somewhere in the mob
I can hear my will to live
saying very carefully: really, you had a great time
but this party's almost over.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Muzzle, 2018.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Arab Girl
1.
She doesn't read
The Atlantic
nor does she orgasm.
2.
Dancing, sucking her belly toward her spine.
Black vines
sway to the mumble of a lute,
descend the trellis of her,
sweep bare feet.
3.
Princess Jasmine
Gigi Hadid
Shakira
Sabah
4.
Have you seen the brown-necked raven
who builds a home inside a bomb shelter?
The laughing dove who nests in olive trees?
5.
I am given the name of an American cheerleader; I am
fearfully made.
6.
almond eyes & thighs
& rug-burned knees
7.
I don't know which I prefer:
to be a child in my father's house
a servant in my husband's
or liberated by a
fashion
magazine?
8.
Salma Hayek
George Clooneyswifey
Fairouz
A Pole-Dancing Muslim Miss USA
9.
Carrying a basket into a field
disappearing parcel by parcel.
She mourns groves of desire.
10.
She dies
like an American in the street or some Mesopotamian desert
at midnight in the afternoon.
11.
The bulbul also sings.
12.
Someday my name will sound like Olds,
will sound like Plath.
Someday, in my father's Spanish inflection,
will sound like Abughattàs.
13.created by God
to fuck,
to serve
coffee and tea.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Thrush Journal, 2017.
Little Dume
I'm ten fingers deep
in this ashtray of an existence,
while he's driving off to Little Dume
to swim in the ocean by himself.
It infuriates me that he’s good
at living. I want to learn
from a man like that—to drown
the phantom selves
looming like sea foam—
to thrust spectacularly
into the singular
body so that the ocean fears me.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Waxwing, 2019.
Another Dinner Party
With a head full of smoke, nothing fills me up.
Pears, persimmons, ice, crossing my legs
on the kitchen counter. Maybe I need
a woman, a motherless dandelion
to rub emptiness with me.
In the perpetual dinner party of my brain
the guests are tired. They want to go home.
I’m hooking them at the door with my remembers,
flirting with the hostages
at my all-hours discothèque:
One kneeling before a toilet
in a bathroom full of SSRIs.
One kissing her dying father
and one ignoring his call.
One spread out and reading Nietzsche
amid Styrofoam takeout containers.
One licking a mushroom
with Dan or Ben or Tom.
One arching on the Persian carpet.
One tattooing a kite to her ribs.
One sliding a fishnetted knee between another's
stockinged legs. Girls, sad and high,
we never know who is big or bad or wolf
until he’s loved or left or made a meal of us.
Tired of being devoured,
I make a model of my sorrow, and kiss it.
I’ve been waiting on my misery like a man who won’t come.
I used to live on crumbs
wanting to be touched
in the house where no one keeps me.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Waxwing, 2019.