Excerpt from
Don’t say that my son
Is walking in heaven
By Islam Nawwar
Translated by
Phoebe Bay Carter
Part 1
Everyone turns into a black woman from the Saeed
Head shaved like a man
Running on an impotent husband and
Children.
She might be called, for example, three-hundred million, three-hundred-and-seventy-five thousand, six hundred and twenty four
And this number might correspond in some calculation
To a redbrick wall holding up the roof of a four-story house.
Melodies dispatched from World War II
From Radio Warsaw, bombed as Wladislaw Szpilman was playing
A movement of Chopin’s romantic Nocturne No. 20, reminds me
Of the absurdity
Of sell a kidney.
In 2050 the redbrick walls holding up the roof of a four-story house died a cliché death, at age seventy
“Avec Le Temps”*
The black woman’s walls died, and I had been hoping with all my heart, to fuck her ass.
Then our Father priest said
To a black man
named him my father:
Confess your blackness;
A black man bawled in a town square
A black gang passed by;
Both feet in hellfire
And a pillaged shack
A raped woman in Berlin
A black woman
Sang:
“The girls must wait
Wait, my friends.”
So rest assured
The ugly black gorilla is just that
And I am still alive
Here, reciting poetry about the details of my life
Reading it like reading internal medicine books
Or Facebook timeline
Hence there is no death in the surgery ER to make itself clearer than a non-present death in the internal medicine ER
And rest assured
I am the ultimate romantic
I will call you “my darling princess”
And I will prove to you I am not a frog
That I have a cheek
It is my own cheek
And I let tears run down it
They are my own tears
So kiss this cheek and tell me:
“calm down
The ambulance is a delivery van carrying pizza from L’Angelletto resturant, to the university hospital, and there’s no death inside”
The heart-and-lung resuscitation unit is to the right of the surgery ER.
A rose tossed into existence did not ask why it bloomed or wilted
Our father’s bowels / in Ophelia’s hand / or a rose
In Gertrude’s hand / a rose / or our father’s bowels
O Hamlet Ur-Hamlet**
The heart-and-lung resuscitation unit is to the right of the surgery ER
In Elsinore.
O nirvana O nirvana, I despair to death
I don’t even understand my own language, my own metaphor
O holy Arabian, O holy shit
A terrified child didn’t ask, crying
O captin my captin***
*French song
“Ur-Hamlet: a play of unknown author thought to be one of the sources for Shakespeare’s play “
From a poem of Walt whitman
