You, with your tongue

against the backs of teeth.

You, of ahhhhhhh,

of sssssssss. 

Let me ask you this:

which one of us the drum’s

old skin & which

the stick? You know

why I’m asking.

You’ve been bargaining again.

Death was spreading its fungus

on a fig; eating tomorrow’s honey.

Don’t say you did what you could.

Don’t give me lessons on the wasp

that burrows into the center, losing her wings.

A truck with body bags came in.

People took what they needed.

What did they need?

They needed a cup of flour.

They needed an iron pill.

But instead, you were—where?

whose?

The people counted:

 “One.”

 “One.”

 “One.”

Oh Language, what

hush you made below.

Poem Note: the lines, “One.” /“One.” / “ One.” are a reference to these lines from Pádraig Ó Tuama: “…so I count //one life / one life / one life / one life / one life // because each time / is the first time / that life / has been taken.”

First published by Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press)

THE CLOCK MEN

All day, the talk is lint.

Committees meet and look at their calendars.

The carpet hardly moves.

The lobby doesn’t even smell of corpses.

It’s Monday here.

There’s a salad bar here.

In Rafah, a wall is blown off by somebody’s son.

He’s gotten his life back on track now.

His father doesn’t cry outside his door anymore.

A tiny nozzle mists the lettuce.

The clock on each laptop jogs on its treadmill.

At 12:31, the meeting resumes.

No one looks at the sky anymore.

Looking has gotten risky.

Once I looked at a birthday cake

and saw a president’s face.

It was burning there

next to a piece of my cousin’s bedroom.

There were no balloons but when I looked up I saw a cloud inflating—round and swollen,

dark around the edges, bleeding through with light, pulling more and more filament into her

breasts, bright powdery hearts and fleshy grays folding into her, and still more, dense fast

moving bars and flat brown sheets that smothered the sun curling into her mass, until she

was heaving, large, now straddling the earth, bearing down–

that day, we sang an old song

and ate cake with our hands

until we had to leave

the world we knew behind.

But there were some who stayed, gripping their keyboards

even as gales lifted the roof off their box, typing:

Fill out this meeting poll today!

You must choose between 2:05 and 2:08!

First published by Social Text: https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/the-clock-men/

GRANT PROPOSAL FOR YOUR EMERGENCY

1. Objective: To hold my beloved’s hand by the sea.

2. Please describe your project in as much detail as possible: 

My hair will fly into my lover’s mouth

and we will smile until the facial muscles

can pull upwards no more. Then, we will enter the sea.

Swill every blue tincture.

3. What is the nature of your emergency? 

What is the nature of your fund?

4. Projected outcomes: 

• My lover’s terrible drawing of the sea
• A slowly emptied pot of mahshi
• One photograph of my beloved’s back entering the sea, palms raised

as though to say, It’s not too cold

5. What investments will your project require?

For my beloved’s hand to be pulled out of a witness’ testimony

and returned to me. The past to not be a bleeding

visitor who asks why the ambulance never arrives.

6. Proposed budget:

7. Please provide a schedule of deliverables: 

And you can find the report of what we did tied to a kite

First published by Adi Magazine: https://adimagazine.com/articles/two-poems-wathington/

Today I have the privilege and pleasure of speaking with Nicholas Mirzoeff and Priscilla Wathington about the genocide in Gaza, and how developing a new way of seeing and writing is demanded of us to address this historical moment. In the words of Silvia Federici, “Palestine is the World.”  We take Nick’s recent book, To See in the Dark, and animate it by having Priscilla read from her poetry.

Nick writes: “After a year of genocide, I think politics is now the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words. Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said.

What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do.”

The goal behind this dynamic interplay is to create the grounds for solidarity with Palestine, and with all other oppressed peoples in the world, and with the planet itself.

Please see the blog for this episode to find the poems read by Priscilla Wathington.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and chair in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. To See In The Dark: Palestine and Visual  Activism  (2025) is being translated into Czech, Italian and Spanish. It is the most recent of more than a dozen books, including How To See The World (2015), translated into eleven languages. Since Occupy Wall Street (2011), his work has been in dialogue with social movements, including Black Lives Matter (The Appearance of Black Lives Matter) and #MeToo. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Nation and LARB. He lives in New York.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet/editor and the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick, which draws from her past human rights advocacy work. She is asking you to resist the lie that you are too helpless, or too busy, or too small to change anything. Take your small hand and your small voice and add it to this symphony against the genocide taking place in Gaza; and speak up not only about Gaza but also Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and your own backyard, and everywhere that humanity is at risk.

Today I am delighted to talk with Eunsong Kim about her stunning book, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property. It is remarkable in its theoretical conceptualization, argument, and archival work. Kim argues that the beginnings of elite art collection in the United States coincided with the rise of the robber barons and the suppression of the labor movement. She connects this to Taylorism and the idea of scientific management, that further extenuated the rift between the mind and the body, between intellectual activity and labor. Not coincidentally, this distribution of kinds of work created a new distribution of value. In each case, Kim argues, race played a fundamental role. Ranging from the “found” art of Duchamp to the pseudo-Marxist conceptual art of Sierra, Kim eviscerates both pretention and cruelty, and restores the laboring body and what it produces to prominence, along with a truly re-invigorated and capacious sense of the Imagination outside of the constraints of neoliberal aesthetics.

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of gospel of regicide (2017), and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.

Today I am deeply honored to spend time with poet, activist, and scholar Jamaica Osorio. Shortly after October 7, 2023, she began to write a series of astonishing poems about the war in Gaza and the genocide. Osorio graces us with readings of some of those poems, and engages in a rich, complex, and deeply moving discussion of what went into their composition. Throughout, we talk about the power of poetry to suspend time and allow us the space to contemplate the impossible.  We talk about the nature of not knowing, of the inexpressible, and the ways certain poems can give us the strength, energy, and commitment to persist in working for the liberation of all peoples, even when dwelling in grief.

Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar / storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Jamaica earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Jamaica is an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2020 her poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way we Rise which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021.  In 2022 she was a lead artist and Co-writer of the revolutionary VR Documentary, On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world),  that premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 and won the XR experience Jury award at SXSW 2022. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Post Doctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). She is the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea which was published in 2021 by The University of Minnesota Press. She believes in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

Today I talk with poet Maya Salameh about her poetry collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, which won the prestigious Etal Adnan Poetry Prize in 2022. The judges remarked, “Maya Salameh’s poetry stood out for its inventiveness in cracking the code of life ‘between system and culture’…The turns and swerves the poems make are astonishing; the expectations they upend are remarkable… It’s a testament to the aesthetic boundaries and intellectual revolt poets of Arab heritage are pushing, breaking, and reinventing.” We talk about what led her to both technology and poetry, language and story-telling, and the challenges and joys of representing life in the diaspora. In a time of war and genocide, Salameh’s poetry shows how patterns of life and reproduction and desire persist. In her readings and discussions of three poems, we find a new lexicon and a new grammar.

Maya Salameh is the author of Mermaid Theory (Haymarket Books, 2026), How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.