His Hands Going Arthritic
a poem-in-progress, in preparation for celebrating Thanksgiving amid global horrors, for my husband
Hi, everyone. I haven’t known what to read, or what to draw comfort from, or what comfort is acceptable, really, since posting Mosab Abu Toha’s poem last month. The American Book Award-winning Palestenian poet has since been detained, beaten, and released— for the very kind of deft, human-centered poetry I was lauding.
So it feels like the stakes are high, and my expertise and my capacity are both tragicomically low.
Luckily, my students’ poetry has entered my world during this turbulent, depressing era of a month. Soon, the world will have books by these heartful minds, and the world will be better for them: My graduate students are writing poetry about grief that bowls me over, about diasporic language aches, about queer dislocation, about how to carry on with the pathetically American brands of joy— parking lot solitude, diet coke, pixelated rainbows— and why to carry on, about women who do the carrying on with unreal imaginations, and about the women for whom carrying on has been impossible.
In honor of their incredibly hard work, I’m going to share a poem in progress with you today. I haven’t known what to say or how to say it re: the genocide unfolding before our eyes in Palestine, about the fear and anger and grief in Israel, and when I’m consternated like this, I turn to poetry, a genre which embraces the limitations of my perception, the low horizons of my consciousness; a genre which hears the war-machine gurgling in my subconscious.
It’s a work-in-progress, and it’s for Bojan.
MY HUSBAND DOESN’T WATCH THE GENOCIDE UNFOLD
because the carnage is infused
with our I can’t believe’s
and he always can. I could
ask him what it tastes like—
our steeping indecision, imperial
apathy, herbal folklore with
the doll-eyed bite. I could ask him
what he dreams about at night.
I know his chronic PTSD
sometimes feeds him a dream
of a troubled house. Let’s
try to picture him, lost within
himself. When I do,
too soon comes I’ve
felt that, once— and family,
he held me until I climbed
out again. How
can I explain? If I Zillow
the real estate of my own
subconscious affairs, might I
show you how our interiorities
do not compare? Look,
the green pastures I would
eschew are there, framed by
expensive windows— and purple butterflies
feed on the god-chosen honeysuckle
I keep just out of sight. I know
just where to find a dwarf-sized
cactus, anachronistic and out of
place, in the way of dreams,
and dream-me names her
something rather quaint. In time
I know Little Pepper will manage
seed-full red fruits. I will bang them
open on a rock, parse the specks
of antimatter, spread the sticky seeds
on the front porch
of my parents’ divorce, and
when I wake, I will go to my husband
for advice.
I give him my hurt
feelings to consider, my desire
to talk talk talk, and listen—
he listens, even as I stutter through
line after line of inherited cruelty,
my nonsense like cartoon bubbles
in a Calvin & Hobbes Thanksgiving.
You should know he has to work harder
than I do to love, and that he does,
his hands going arthritic.
I know how terrifying it feels to lose a sense of moral superiority because I am constantly living that loss. Does it suck? Sure. It feels like I am in an unending state of untangling the big narratives that have been spoonfed to me: the stories about the righteousness of American military, the savior complex we have about the development and the use of the atomic bombs (which literally invoke God’s will in my hometown’s folklore of prophecy), and the “we won [the genocidal mission of occupying the United States] so they [the descendants of the people we slaughtered] can suck it” comments that are stark online but just as real beneath the surface of a lot of comments made with “good intentions” IRL. And I know that I risk losing all connection with some of my family members by speaking so plainly; some scoff at me (or are afraid of me?) for daring to look at these narratives more closely. It’s sad and it’s scary, because I want to feel at home in my home, too. But it’s less terrifying than being bombed? So I can [expletive ] buck up.
I am in a mixed-race relationship, and my indigenous husband— by virtue of being, by way of his incredible art, and also via his unflinching bravery in the face of constant and institutionalized racism— teaches me every day something new about the myth of American kindness, how often we are failing each other, and that the colonization of indigenous peoples is happening today, in the present tense; that the wounds of white supremacy and slavery are festering, not healed; that the systems are not “broken” but working just as they were intended to. We need to scrutinize those intentions. And I believe that we owe it— to our country, to those our silence oppresses— but also each of us owes it to ourselves to lose the false narrative of the American high ground for good. Etgar Keret, the Israeli novelist, wrote recently for the NYTimes: “I Feel a Human Deterioration.” And I think that’s what’s at stake, here. The deterioration of our humanity:
And when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood, in which you support one team and really don’t care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see other pain. I think that in situations like this, it’s a reflex to go to something that you know. But it’s a bad reflex when the world changes around you.
I understand that reflex. I feel it; I respond in reactivity, sometimes. It’s a bad reflex.
The only way I know to rid myself of this conditioned reflex is to be uncomfortably honest with myself when I write poems. I guess I can also share that process with you, here— whoever’s listening. Thank you for doing so.
with love,
Sara
Beautiful. Thank you for being an example of not choosing “sides,” for holding and looking the complexity and chipping away at all the things blocking our ability to do so.
❤️❤️❤️❤️