"at the end of the world, let there be you // my world"
- Danez Smith
of abandoning this shithole called American life
& teleporting to the largest Filasteeni potluck
imaginable: no shelling, no blockades or walls,
no post-9/11 era terrors of surveillance, no wild
-fire lies to feed the American public, no America
to need feeding — everyone will eat here & have
their fill. The teitas will find more pans, flip pot
after pot of maqloobeh, taking 4, no 6, hands
to pull off — this small collectivism of rice, its rise,
& steam & laugh, against a world turned already
upside-down. We'll abandon the doom scroll & feed,
instead, the masses of us, as our beloveds return
& return only to be put to this work of miraculous
care: yes, even in dreaming, this world requires
the work of everybody, & what better way to say
I love you than to pluck the mint or rinse the rice —
yalla we have bellies to fill! There's Fargo & Rasha
waiting gateless for my arrival, while Noor & Summer —
& all our Noors & Summers, & all our Saras & Sarahs —
are here already, hard at work & gossiping, fingers stained
with cheeto dust & labneh, while Randa & Hala smoke
argeelah on an endless porch with all our aunties,
while Naomi reads to a crowd of children, living,
yes, so alive in their wide-eyed listening, while,
in kitchens, elders are peering over shoulders, passing on
the muscle memory of that which once was country —
O to be freed from such names & boundings —
& as the house fills & fills (did I mention we
were housed?) the songs fill the air! As we
pull off the miracle of the largest Filasteeni potluck
imaginable, O, how the imagination grows! After
cousins known after cousins unknown, after even
our dead begin to come back to us, after the magic
of seeing the beloveds we've only known from stories
or poems about resisting, after we confront the whole
of us we have yet to even imagine, we enlargen the table —
make room for our cousins from Lubnan, our Iraqi &
Armenian cousins without need for words like genocide,
our Yemeni cousins not having to say I'll die for you,
our Black cousins who taught us to burn the precincts, break
prisons, in & beyond our minds, our Vietnamese cousins
who know American shrapnel like muscle memory, everyone
who, in their coalitions, made living room for our infinite
infinite —all the people who loved us without explanation —
our Jewish cousins who, with their bodies, resisted with us —
our Indigenous cousins who fought alongside us despite the terrors
that led us into their lands — every organizer from Ferguson
to Minneapolis, from South Africa to Sudan, who said,
we remember the Palestinians, today & everyday, through every
Nakba — every poet exiled & dispossessed from living,
welcome, to the largest potluck imaginable! Look what we built
from the rubble of their imagination: they who could not fathom
this weight of us! We abandoned their failed future, failed
progress, failed names for human — we who know the cost
of leaving time, in our bodies, we who know no elsewhere
but today! We naive enough to write poems imagining
the impossible, we who love ourselves enough for such
tenderness — however brief, we know the work is coming
& here already. We know the conditional tense of every dream
will have an end. How silly of me, to dream utopia disentangled
from borders — we need better names than Heaven, than leaving
the world we knew, for a poem we cannot leave. I'm trying
to have faith in unknowing: to trust in the becoming of us,
unbounded — unboundable — as if the necessary severance
was not of wall or flaming sword, but a question reflected back
to the body: O you who cannot bear this weight of us,
O you who cannot love us completely, O you who cannot
love even your own selves — we know your gaze, your bitter
witness — we die it every day & tunnel into elsewheres
beyond your wildest dreams! To you I say, another world
is possible for it is here already! Abandon yourself, abandon
every Eden tended at our own expense! The table is set —
the fruit beyond knowing is ripe & begging to be plucked!
We are already mid-fall & reaching for life in every act
of choosing — & choosing life in every act of reaching —
& the return is here & here & here & already & —
