so we must meet one another, awash

 dear m

it’s tuesday morning, 5th of june. i’m sitting on the floor of my studio, hands caressing white paper. in my consciousness a green that is seamless, almost deafening. in it the imprint of the news that i read after waking up. i know that this is just the outline. million tongues turned rope in the past months

i find it hard to keep the threads together. my thoughts spiral in- and outwards leaving mycelial patterns in the back of my skull. yesterday i read this passage in Jackie Wang’s book Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun—that an essay is good when you don’t know what it said after you read it. she writes: "Because you were witnessing thinking in action, witnessing someone ‘trying out’ different ideas." 

still, i find myself back with the same question repeatedly: what can poetry, what can art do in the face of these colliding realities. can they be more than an act of  

surrender 

as i’m writing to you Israel has launched yet another offensive in Gaza. last night, while i sat with a friend watching the albino crescent break through the branches of a tree, the first bombs hit Tehran; a few hours later Tel Aviv. i talk to my friends for whom the inexplicable violence is not just another headline but a finger pressed deep into the skin until it dips into a bone. i talk to them yet my words fail to build a bridge between one reality and another, they fail to contain. i find myself unable to say anything. so we sit in silence and stare with scattered eyes

in the media discourse on Gaza, the inexplicit, a vital form of poetry, has become a requirement to not get cancelled. where formerly the porousness of the poetic language was a channel of connectivity and freedom, allowing the recipient to seep into the lacunae between words, it now seems insufficient, even complicit. as a poet i wonder:

where do i turn

i turn to face the walls of the ruins that are not written down. i turn to face objects made of surfaces made of colors that still hold things together: the anthracite porcelain clasps the water the lilac glass clasps the flower the pearl ceramic clasps the fruit. i turn to face myself, in a mirror in a bathroom in a Japanese restaurant as the light absorbs into my skin and i’m hunting for blue grace

i turn towards silence. i spent my mornings in bed, i think of a close friend whose family lives in Tehran, i flinch at the sound of a bottle being thrown into a container outside. i try to bridge the silence by stitching the words that the headlines feed to me on

white cotton fabric:

 destruction, self-defence, buried, rubble, horror, shredded, sheltering, blown-apart

right to a self,

right to a body,

i have a confession to make: i don’t know what to say. i don’t know if i should

a line from Hala Aylan’s poem Naturalized: Can I pull the land from me like a cork? /

I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim / I’ve already said too much. 

dear m

i turn to face words. the media: a river with teeth. i float in it until everything is wrapped in a veil of numbness. images can’t be real. bodies are undone on white paper, numbered. the suffering is so abstracted that it's nothing more than a faint static permeating every breath. meanwhile, i unclog my sink i buy a box of toothpicks i invite friends over for dinner. i manage to fade out the static precisely because i'm here, because of my shape and position in the world

Cary Wolfe writes in the introduction to Michel Serres Parasite: “The one who thinks and writes, the subject of knowledge, must then take the other of knowledge seriously. Noise is always already part of the signal, blindness inescapably accompanies vision [...]. All that is not information, not redundancy, not form or restraints—is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.” 

so how can i, as a writer, transfer the noise

how can i, as a writer, become a listener

another line from Haya Aylan’s poem: Here’s your math. Here’s your hot take. / That number isn’t a number. / That number is a first word, a nickname, a birthday song in June.  

dear m

define a tuesday in june. krishna blue skies, no protective membrane. yesterday i peeled an avocado seed and put it on the table to dry. this morning i did my laundry and one of the pink smiley socks was missing. i bought strawberries and thought of a lover who always called me babes, in plural. i wear my veil in the sizzling streets, i stick headlines and numbers to my skins until nothing can move me

this is an essay about what happens in the gaps between silences

i guess

what i am trying to say is: i find it hard to find words. i am looking for a form of writing that is more an act of listening than of speaking. a form of widening space instead of narrowing it down. i am told that as a German i can’t position myself. we shouldn’t be the ones who become explicit

i wonder: what does position oneself mean and can one ever operate outside that system

i wonder: what is silence if not a position one can only comfortably lean into when one holds the privilege to refrain from words

i wonder: who is we and isn’t that we already a positioning as sharp as a thorn breaking through glass

A line from Ibrahim Nasrallah's poem A Building: Seventy-six are in the room. / In the hallway, / in the bathroom, / in the kitchen, / seventy-six.

i should be on the streets

maybe this is not so much about positioning but about de-positioning oneself, about dissipation instead of location. this is something we love to do—to place ourselves outside the spillings, like immutable, free floating forms with neither past nor present 

imagine: to hold a loaf of bread to hold a fistful of sand to hold the body of a 3-year-old kid to hold a pair keys on a rubberband to hold a cup of grains to hold a lung that still holds a breath to hold a fluttering of pomegranate seeds,
 

a record of static between 2am and 6am

A line from Sholem Berger's poem No: No their death will not revive the dead. / No their hunger is not our bread. / More tears from them just make more tears. / Blood is red. Is red.

dear m

everything is surface now. the skin holds the hand holds the heart which holds a tiny sapphire wave. i am still floating, face down, eyes shielded by the back of my hand which is to say i haven’t unlearned the instinct to look away which is to say geometry was once a system i was confiding in. now i read: geometry of power, military metrics. my brain fails to seize the words like an ear fails to seize particles of infrasound. what i know for sure: these words don’t describe what i see when i resist the instinct to look away; what i know for sure bodies and names are disappeared fingers holding on to fingers dissipating in yellow smoke

Serres: "Theorem: Noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. This parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when  you

look again”

if the headlines that i’m reading are one limb of the body of an organized system then the poet is the parasite that disturbs that system. the poet creates the noise which is what happens in-between: a subterranean river of murmurs that runs beneath the earth

so i set out to look for the noise

i have to begin where i am: 

            a poem is a place to put yourself

A line from Tal Hever-Chybowski's The Destruction of Gaza: In the caravan, shut tight, / I talk to the Eastern Wall / saying: / Shma Yisroel, in Your name / and in mine, they are doing this.

the implicit as 

a)  camouflage—to hide what would otherwise be visible

b)  parasite—records of bodies/voices; a flurry of questions in an open palm

in the discourse on Gaza the inexplicit as camouflage has become the status quo. so on a tuesday in june i pack my notepad and walk down to the river—to become complicit with its rushing sound. i encounter a green that is boundless and ear-piercing, interspersed with the voices of those who aren’t spoken here, whose bodies are encountered in images, shadowy and surrounded by flames. can the poem be a territory to perform the act of listening in, precisely because another person has been here before, leaving traces between letters, connecting tissue

i want to plug the teeth out, one by one, and wrap them in soft tissue paper

Claudia Rankine writes: "My entire life as a writer has involved approaching the image as much as possible to reveal not only what is seen but what is not seen."

i have to start where i am: 

a poem is a place to meet one another, awash

Hala Aylan: Imagine: I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine: / There’s still the month of June.

dear m

a) six hundred thirty-six, militarized, nuclear watchdog, assaults, dehumanized, twenty thousand, buried, self-defence, dozens, red lines, accountability, self-defence, one thousand five hundred, deadliest, death toll, wounded, launched, counterattack, forty thousand, relentless, uninhabitable, systematical, multifront, hostages, atrocities, displaced, makeshift shelter, military metrics, tunnels, ruins, collapsing, genocide,

silence 

b) Ibrahim Nasrallah: A moment of silence swallows the universe. / Nothing remains except a grave / as wide as this world.