to you the past is us the past the past is everything

Art by Kristina Closs; Photo slice is from a picture of my mom and three of her siblings walking down the street in Damascus in the 1950s.

Pictures

by Ahmad Almallah

we sat together you and I mother next to son
the armchairs worn against the dullness of white walls
you read aloud the same sentence over and over

I place your hand in mine do I let go I stand
there was between us something everything
to you the past is us the past the past is everything

and there I look the beige cupboard full of pictures
it’s still closed up your youth I know almost nothing
I am your son the youngest one the son of your aging

I open up the beige the black and white pictures
your arms revealed and in the sun revealing
the weak and slender hand is aimless on the table

I place a photo in your palm your daughter and your sons
I am a child the funny face I make you point to him
you ask if he belongs to me I say he is your son

you do not know you look at me in wonder
the past the past is everything the present
your mind the nerves the stems of blood bursting

from Bitter English

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make me unafraid of what is disappearing

Just one from Raymond Antrobus‘s incredible collection The Perseverance and its pages of astonishing poems on family, language, grief, inheritance, sound, silence, his identity as a deaf British Jamaican man, and so much more.

Art by Kristina Closs

“Dementia”

    ‘black with widening amnesia’
    Derek Walcott 

When his sleeping face 
was a scrunched tissue, 
wet with babbling, 

you came, unravelling a joy, 
making him euphoric, dribbling
from his mouth–

you simplified a complicated man, 
swallowed his past
until your breath was
warm as Caribbean
concrete–

O tender syndrome
steady in his greying eyes,
fading song
in his grand dancehall,

if you must, 
do your gentle magic,
but make me unafraid
of what is

disappearing.

I wash her hands with summer rain.

Illustration by Kristina Closs

“Taproot and Cradle” by Khaled Mattawa (1964-)

Evening coffee, and my mother salts
her evening broth—not equanimity,
but the nick of her wrist—

and my mother bakes bread,
and my mother hobbles knees locked,
and my mother carries the soft stones of her years.

Fists balled in my pocket,
riding the century’s drift,
I carry a wish and a wound.

It’s raining a noisy frost,
the inhabitants’ cruel happy laughs,
their sighs and curses,

small upheavals that slide
from their bellies,
down to their freezing toes..

And the city trudges, and night
loosens its reins, a stolen bulldozer,
a tank full of clowns.

Who’s calling
my name
from the window now?

She touches her hair—
She caresses her beauty
like the coffin of a child.

O pen of late arrivals.
O knife of darkened temples.
O my scurrying, my drunken snakes. 

I wash her hands with summer rain.
I remember the killed enemy.
I remember my good friends.