INHUMAN RESOURCES—selected poems

As an Arab woman, I’ve always been acutely aware of the accelerating militarization of our civilian life and institutions. I grew up in San Diego, which hosts the largest military concentration in the world. My high school was overrun with military recruiters hoping to seduce us into signing our college years away to the Navy. At Stanford, many of the software engineers I knew pursued Palantir internships or other opportunities in defense; one classmate of mine interviewed to work with the CIA. When I started law school in 2024, I noticed that even in this atmosphere, the industry of war (and its fabrication) pervaded my classrooms. It is easy to feel like you are dying of rage, that you are alone in it, when navigating institutions like this. I started reflecting on all the non-weapon resources in our cultural and professional networks that normalize this militarization, and on the war economy as an ecological one, too; war-related emissions between 2001-2017 generated over 400 million metric tons of CO2. As Darwish says: “history is the dailiness / of weapons prescribed upon our bodies,” and also upon the earth our bodies rely on. I hope these poems name that dailiness in its softest disguises—the op-eds in The Atlantic, the Reels that launder genocide into a conversation starter—and refuse to let its violence pass for the ordinary.

— Maya Salameh

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY 

xxxxxxxxxwhich is closer to my heart, a soldier from my 
xxxxxxxxxcountry or a poet from my enemy’s country?  – ghayath almadhoun

wine aspires to age like me. all these complexes & no chemistry to show for it. I know nothing of my country. I 

pierce my ears with elegies. in the heart of the heart of another country, I 
will write that my mother is the shade with which we pave the roads of holy books. I 

will write the last branch of the cedar in my floor, I 
will write of the price of bread. I will not weep. I 

scrape continents under my fingernails & I 

live a contradiction. back when the Dead Sea was alive & home was still an abstract noun signifying desire, we had black currants for eyes, lace in our gums, before our country meant a blur of bad news, that gaping wound stitched between the Tigris & Euphrates. eventually home becomes real & not just an abstract noun signifying desire. chamomile cake is rising in the oven, gold manna in rectangular gridlock; we are always

counting our dead. 
 

INHUMAN RESOURCES

tactical weapons translation devices an op-ed in The Atlantic the Mckinsey internship the front-page ad in the New York Times the LinkedIn diatribes about market capture the street interviews on Reels calling into question the death toll the syllabus teeming with munitions the casually mentioned vacations the constant rolling orange doubt the unending stain of controversy the laundered prestige waiting for you to come in this afternoon for your blowdry & pedicure 
 

CURRICULUM VITAE 

1. I grew up 15 miles from the border.
2. when I see children eat trash I know the world is wasted, wasting; America
salvaging Arab children’s arms & legs for salvage/prize story/spare parts. my gender is this
salvage/all salvaged from it. salvation of parks & libraries closed on weekends; salve of
capital & 6 dollar cocktail Thursdays. sorry for the sonata of their backs. there will be an
encore next term.
3. I want to split an egg over the name California & burn it. I want to belong to the nations of
the peoples who loved this land before I was displaced to it. I want god’s language before
the crusaders. I gift my sister abalone from Ensenada. I hope the ocean tells her things she’s
forgotten.
4. it’s a sunny day in Berkeley; Nina’s wedged me into xl lashes & my nails are blue with
silver embellishments & we buy shredded pork buns with chrysanthemum tea. if one turned
to the dictionary & looked for summer, they’d find us.
5. I grew up 15 miles from the border. I was born with dark hair, & the hospital was a dry 75
degrees. I cost $1,800 to be born.
6. war-related emissions between 2001-2017, including “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria, generated over 400 million metric tons of CO2, roughly equivalent to the emissions of almost 85 million cars.
7. Fig. 6.
8. after spending the weekend in Rosarito, we learn that
3 men had also traveled there that weekend. we learn their
bodies were found on Wednesday. I think of me in my red
dress I regretted, the eyes of the parking attendant
lingering like carrion. I think of Nina’s birthday dinner &
the valet grinning, showing me all his incisors. I think of
my body, always a metaphor about walking down the
street,  carrion for review, my gait wide like I’m not afraid.
the attendant says he loves my blue mascara & am I from here?
9. our country, that puddle seeping. this violence is hard
to render romantic; the guts on the walls are too fresh.