Fady Joudah

 

Dimoprphism

The first time I ate a crab sandwich I was a boy and loved it

it wasn’t for another ten years that I found out it was imitation crab

Soluble salty rubber

two waters at the confluence of their steady eddy synapse

my triceps fat pressed to your triceps fat

on a bench inside a museum’s dark room

video installation of two bodies dancing

Me in my stillness

you in your movement

what the moving know about stillness

the still don’t know and vice versa

The Greek Myth professor lectured to us

in his voice of reading children stories to children

And docked me points when I remembered the tales

but couldn’t spell the names

Fady Joudah

 

IT’S NOT BLOOD’S FAULT IT’S RED

Skin strikes skin over plate and within
the frame whose borders are laser-hung
by players who render umpires surplus

What I propose insists on return:
I return you to you you return me to me
or me to me and you to you
return is only to the stranger

Otherwise this thing between our nipples
and knees will mar life for life
what is reflex what is fasciculation
my boredom which you call my loneliness
our pose as entries in the glossary of vision

Our error was mutual:
I did not want to be someone else’s dream
and you have enough of what incinerates
for the light inside you to shine
free of soot

Our bodies blend as alibis
and your cherries are black
as long we as are bodies on screen

Fady Joudah

 

from 

A Spider, an Arab, and a Muslim Walk into a Cave

The prophet and his closest disciple, Abu Bakr, were hiding in a cave in Jabal Thawr before heading north to Medina. When Mecca’s rulers sent their best trackers to follow the two men to the exact spot where they hid, one of the “invisible soldiers” who God enlisted to aid his messenger was a spider. As the bounty hunters approached the cave, the spider wove a web obstructing the entrance. The bounty hunters paused: surely, they thought, too little time had elapsed for a spider to have spun such intricate work. They turned back to Mecca empty handed. And schoolchildren today learn about the holy spider and her miraculous, protective web.

Fady Joudah

The Outer Rings of Saturn

Is disease a longing as acceleration is gravity?
This weekend the beaches are empty,

the weather perfect, you’re caught
between the pristine
and the poor having time to frolic.

Studies show that the jasmine
can’t let go of the rose bush

in your backyard but can do without the thorns.
Whatever your mourning, it’s an animal

not a constellation. If anything, you’re jubilee,
coffee in the morning, kids to school,

yoga, zumba, a paycheck sustained
on the rungs of payback. This afternoon,

you’d like to focus your gratitude
on the mailwoman who didn’t deliver

any news. And on the doctor
who complied with your demands.

Fady Joudah

Carousel

 

All you have been and all 

you have experienced has happened to me.

I travel from my future to our past to lose 

my origins. What’s the beginning?

Where? There was a loophole, and I was the camel 

that went through. One hump or two?

The answers to my questions are beyond me 

but I only ask questions with answers I can believe.

I have seen the world without you in it 

and it’s not what you think.

In the future you will see 

that it was me who gave you the order to ruin my past.

In my past you will seem wicked.

I will not accept your innocence.