Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry

Saladin Ahmed

Saladin Ahmed Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit, Michigan, raised in neighboring Dearborn (home to the largest Arab American community in the United States), and educated at the University of Michigan and Rutgers University. His lineage is Lebanese, Egyptian, and Irish, and his poetic influences, evident in the eclecticism and multiplicity of voices found in his work, range from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights to the Qur’an, surrealism, the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop, and fantasy novels. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals, among them Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab AmericanWriting. He holds an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College and is a Ph.D. candidate in eighteenth-century British literature. Ghazal The dark side of green Venus hovers above paper; there are tides and tidal waves in a soul made of paper. I could run into the rain-streaked morning, do a handstand on another man’s property, make a friend of paper. At 1 A.M. in Central Booking two dudes barter quietly through bars, one of them dangling a dove paper. Falasteen! They’ve got you surrounded, subtracting you with assault choppers while down your raw throat they shove paper! The myths of then vs. the myths of now—Salah Al-Din, the general that bitch-slapped Europe, was known to love paper. 29 1CHARARA_pages_i-164.qxd:Layout 1 11/14/08 2:36 PM Page 29 Over the Phone, One of Our Hero’s Close Personal Homeboys Recounts Life in a College Town I miss having you around too, dawg. Listen to my wack-ass routine: The Great Hand makes a striking motion, and the day is cracked open, sliding onto the blazing iron of the world. I imagine myself as the yellow center: inconstant, supple and relaxed until forced to harden against the whiteness that surrounds me, the encroaching blank. The Third World Werewolf Speaks to Our Hero of Life in the Financial Zone In a word, brother, it is dangerous— Silver is too easy to come by in this country, and they confuse the moon with lasers and smog. But even a half-man has to make a living. I will have to hide among them until the time is right— I’ll have to hide, one-eyebrowed, a computer folded beneath my arm. 30 Saladin Ahmed 1CHARARA_pages_i-164.qxd:Layout 1 11/14/08 2:36 PM Page 30 Ibn Sina He sits in a blue kaftan like a small ocean His hand a fierce brown bird— or like that of a fierce brown bird It moves from right to left, his calligraphy brush switching, the snipped mustache of a djinn Incense burns in a tiny iron cage, and there are apples at his elbow Is he writing on versification, jurisprudence, medicine, remedies of the heart? Which of his hundred books is he completing? How can he be so calm, hearing the bombs fall on his family, only a thousand years away? Saladin Ahmed 31 1CHARARA_pages_i-164.qxd:Layout 1 11/14/08 2:36 PM Page 31 ...