Dear […]

by Fady Joudah

I have my dead. How are they
mine? Can I let them go
without knowing how many they are or who?
They keep coming. I have ceased updating
the world. I have told the truth,
have spent my life mourning it with milestones.
Haven’t you? I have lied. My dead and I
have never met or spoken a word. As for their names
in English, Allahu Akbar. And as for my living
kin who have met their dead in life:
I am a grief capitalist, I claim them all.
The siege said so. The siege said, no, it’s ill-advised
for my heart to get too close to those
the siege will kill. Did I stay away?
How away? How alone, my alone.
First, we were grass and the siege mowed us.
And you cheered the mirror state of your lawn.
You wanted it maintained. Same here as there.
One state or two. One fallacy for another.
I have told the truth. I have my dead.
They were given decades to breed like rabbits.
I couldn’t keep up down the rabbit hole.
I was busy amassing a fortune for a resurrection
foretold. My last name is so many who are not.
This village near that. We coalesced, mongrelized
into orchards of what and what not,
and learned to count: Two, three, fifty pigeons
and a hundred thousand stars in the night.
The freshly plucked are the brightest.
The flickering forever maimed.
Astral, the math. My black hole and yours,
valves for the same light. Is yours a flail valve?
I have my dead. I am changed
because you have wasted their lives.
Too many for me, not enough for you.
So why do you want to kiss me
in these unprecedented times? Kill and tell.
And my kin, they’re always asking for nothing.
Then it’s always something you make them beg for.
Your purulent milk, yellow, green, then rust.
I have laid the truth. I have furnished no proof.
I prefer not to. I have lied. My bereaved are more
than a hundred, fewer than ten. Fifty ways to say it.
I’ve been with you longer than I’ve been with them.
Fifty ways to say it. You, my killer, have become my kin.
Say “Good morning” to me in Arabic.
And say “Good night.” Every morning
and every night. In Arabic. Say them to me,
to my grass, my living, and my dead.

About the Author

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. A winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007, he has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.