“How to be a Son,” and “A Beautiful Child” are poems are from Omar Sakr’s collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP). “Visceral and energetic, Omar Sakr’s poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a seething, urgent collection from a distinctive new voice.”
Omar Sakr
Two poems from The Lost Arabs.
How to be a son
My father was for the longest time
a plastic smile locked under the bed.
Before that, he was whatever came
out of my mother’s mouth. He was
I’ll tell you when you’re older. He was winding smoke,
a secret name. That fucking Turk.
He was foreign word, distant country.
I gave myself up to her hands which also
fathered; they shaped me into flinch.
Into hesitant crouch, expectant bruise.
Into locked door, CIA black site-
my body unknown and denied to any
but the basest men. I said beat my father
into me please, but he couldn’t be found.
And when he was, I wished he remained
lost. He blamed himself for the men I want.
A father can negate any need he thinks
they are the sum of all desires he thinks
absence has a gender. Listen.
You can’t backdate love, it destroys
history, which is all that I have & so
like any man, want to abandon.
In the absence of time I will invent
roses, a lineage beyond geography,
then all manner of gorgeous people
who rove in desert and olive grove,
in wet kingdoms, on the hunt for villages
where a boy can love a boy & still be
called son
A Beautiful Child
after Jericho Brown
You are not as tired of diaspora
poetry as I am of the diaspora. Sometimes
I thank God that I was born inside an American
-made tank. Sometimes I weep within
the beast. My uncle works on the railroads
and goes home to his nuclear family loathing
my queerness from afar. He and I tend
our silence, a beautiful child
until it speaks.Another uncle is a guard
with two ex-wives and a secret love
of comic books. Tragedy made him the head
of his family too soon. Don’t weep for your dad
he said, weep for me. ‘You didn’t know him
like I did.’ I have a third uncle, a mechanic
who visits his home in Lebanon every year
& now I must admit English has failed me.
I should say kholo, my mother’s brother.
I should say umja, my father’s brother
so you know which branch of the tree to cut-or
cherish. My uncles are doused in industry, good sons
of the State. They get on with what needs
getting on. Language is their least favorite
daughter. They use their mouths for breath
and do their best to forget the world
outside. I think they love where they come
from but in truth, I have never heard them
say so, except to mutter they do not want
to pay taxes in two countries come on
one is killing them already &
isn’t that enough
