“If you read this and can hear me...”
New Poetry by Fady Joudah

[…]

If you read this and can hear me,
what’s that smell? I, sour

before sweet, pugnacious
or placid, indentured
or irrelevant to

your solidarity, which won’t acknowledge
the debt it owes to my resistance.

If you see me marvel
at mushrooms that devour plastic,
what do you observe? Fungus,

the new worm, like chandeliers
they wed the earth, and everything you learn
to make yours: father

of origin, warlock of point
and line, mother of the unsaid.

If the spirit says, scream, I scream,
you scream, we all scream
for or against a genocide on livestream.

When like a poppy I am shattered
into your nostrils or milled
within the hard exoskeleton
of a pill the nation

prescribes to you for my pain.
Top conscience, I’m not okay.
We’re not okay
with your genocide bouquet.

_________________________

[…] by Fady Joudah, is available now from Milkweed. NB, the poem above appears in the UK edition, available from Out-Spoken Press March 23 (cover below).