The way we climb up the stairs to see our world, how it glitters like granite. I touch your face, your hands, and yes all of it real. One flake after the other, then a city of hail and dust, my people and I, we dress the streets like blizzard. Your limb, my limb. All the streets, in the hours: ours. Have we always been related? My brother, my lover, my mother, my son. I watch myself dissolve the way sugar does. Dissolve the way faith does and it doesn’t matter who cries as long as one of us is. Every window a gaze, all the highways leading back, march on, you turn and say, we are past the finish line, and I am a photographer without lm, without memory: dazed. Listen, I want to be good for us. I’ll wake up early to block the roads. I’ll wash the dishes. I’ll graffiti every space in between, delicate the way patriots are. Who dreamt this, how we stand in a circle the way children do at breaktime, chanting and chanting, our breaths steady as lightbulb, and no one, none at all, turning back? Let’s take our wardrobes to the streets, let’s watch all that we own flutter as flimsy hearts to the wind. I’ll let go of everything. Listen, I’ve waited years for you to stretch your hands out to me like a pinion, for me to come closer, to see you, see what you’re seeing. I want to name every street in this country after you. I want to tell my father, here, baba, this, this is what you dreamed of. We walk into our homes as though they aren’t ours to keep, only a footpath of stone leading to another land. I can see the other land, don’t you. Dip your toes into the water, see how the ice straws its way into our chests? Baba, come home. Listen, I promise, nothing is nameless here. Here is a song not about exile or death. Here is a song.

“I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country”—Joy Harjo

I give up. I want to give up but weeks later & my body,
singing to the full moon, eyeing it, divine. Thank god

the moon is so far away and is this why I love it so.
Tonight we give up on meaning. Tonight, I only trail you,

how you dance, hands hovering as mist, as prayer,
& before I join, I thank my soft body, alive to witness.

I thank my soft body for knowing when to numb,
how to sore. Here I was, thinking, after the explosion

life would stop (as it should). But maybe joy isn’t resistance.
Maybe joy is the body doing what it has to do:

disappearing. The first nuclear explosion taught us
something about how the moon was formed.

The night of August 4 we walked Beirut’s streets, drugged,
the glass like snow, like fireflies, like surface of a moon.

I give up. I want to give up but weeks later & how to,
when we are here. Both sinking & windborne, disposed.

Still finding shards in old books, plant pots, our pockets.
The sound of shoveling glass, air: everywhere nowhere.

To Live Here

BY NUR TURKMANI