Two Poems by Saif Sidari

Homewrecker

Does a dream fall sick like the dreamers? ...
Can a people be born on the guillotine?

— Mahmoud Darwish, ‘We Are Entitled to Love Autumn’

And I only ever know myself hanging, in the exulted tempest   untouched
by nativities—the precious syllables
emptied to the firmaments, which could not care to claim me
but labour only to intubate the clouds, blithely feeding my body   to the greying
furies, my own jettisoned to the cinder draperies of refugee camps, a bay of white
polyester sheets, illuminated with ornate house keys, bandaged from Catastrophe. A world
disappearing, from my grandfather’s memory—exit wounds. I can’t find your grandmother.
I cradle his hand, stitching back   time, She died three years ago, seedi. He recalls
his own key, cloaked in his jubbah, wields it like a prayer, the copper right
of return, remains, welded intimately to his skeletal frame, in spite of
the bulldozer, rending his home in its cavernous maw, hatchet season, entitled
homewrecker, who kneads my histories into spoils   of war, tragedy-capital to make victim
of an other, blood mixing in the mortar, a communion of extolled myths
migrating at the beak of an arrow, for new beginnings, new ceaseless wounding,
‘cleansing’ means   cleaving, the net of my parched lips gathering dreams, generational
springs nurture me, the stone resitting the mouth, of a tank, cast like going back
in Her arms, when from the mourning we will sing, as we once would, a song that is ours;
a key longs for turning, locks, unspooling the brow, and I am no longer
scattering, everywhere   a ruin meandering through the trees, or immigration offices.

I want to write about love

I wanted to write about love. And I found myself wishing
my mother would stop praying for me—there is no hope for me
inside her prayers. She straps her dream on the neck of an unknown
patron—I am her son and her son never existed. What can love mean
in the unseeing eyes? My truer light travels from an extinguished star;
it carries stories of my absences, my distance—it penetrates an alien sky.
But what is there to look up to, in the big city? Her heart searches for me
and finds an unsparing darkness. She carves from it her false child—I
watch her bake, wet and knead the dough, leave it, to rise, tear it apart,
righting it to shape, stuffing it with store-bought filling, singeing it good
to be consumed by the family. My mercurial bodies become, a landscape
for conquest, a displacement upon a displacement, a letter that will never
arrive again—goodbye Sycamore tree, goodbye good trouble, good-
bye her smile.

Saif Sidari is a transnational queer writer from Palestine, currently residing in Brighton & Hove, England. He is a doctoral researcher at the University of Brighton in English Literature and his work has been featured in Eunoia Review, Ghost City Press, and Blink-Ink. You can find him on Instagram @saif.sidari.