Birthright Poems

In their first full-length collection, Palestinian American poet/activist Abraham highlights the plight of the Palestinian people in caustic, free-flowing language. This is poetry not just read but laceratingly felt, as Abraham condenses to tar-thick fury what it's like to lose one's home ("i was whole once;…now they paint us arsonist/ on our own land") as "My people carry another sunrise on their backs;/ Bear the ashes of two diasporas on their backs." Even love is not necessarily a balm: "the first time a boy craved/ me, he said, i want what my god refuses// me…; he still called me// fucking queer," says one poem, and a plaintive ending to the collection addresses their father: "I love you -- I mean, do you love me enough to stay? VERDICT A gut-punch read, excellently crafted and clarifying not just the political but the human condition.

[ BINARY. ] once i had a body & that body was a [male/female] body. some days i contoured & dressed the [male/female] body & others i spat it out like a pit or seed uprooted from a digestible flesh. in either case it was a [consumable/indigestible] body. something to swallow & fill the void of every [rapist/lover]. how the body turned [solid/fluid] in the presence of bone-shattering shear & chaotic tensors. how it puddled in its own redaction & swelled, stubborn, much like the blood who cannot unknow the turbulence it was born into. sometimes the body feared its own [male/female] reflection, bestial like only a [terrorist/freedom-fighter] can know. the wrong historian refuses to call my body [occupier/ occupied] - says the truth is somewhere in between, is non-binary, but i can think of no [conflict/occupation] more clear than that of this body & isn't that worth a decisive history? no, my gender is not a refugee caught between the ash of two genocides. i cannot be in exile from a body i was [never/always] home in. i only know how to love the body in [fragments/categories]. my gender is a runaway ghost train. my gender is the mirror speaking back in shattered tongues. i am all of the question marks in your medical books. a [doctor/ anthropologist] once tried to encode the body into a binary rivulet - a sequence of 0's and 1's to name this digitized fluidity. but even in its purest form, the body was still a mistranslation of itself Excerpted from Birthright by George Abraham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.