Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Rasha Abdulhadi

As the incoming administration builds its agenda of attack on marginalized people, on freedom of speech, on the earth itself, poetry will continue to be an essential voice of resistance. Poets will speak out in solidarity, united against hatred, systemic oppression, and violence and for justice, beauty, and community.

                

In this spirit, Split This Rock is offering its blog as a Virtual Open Mic. For the rest of this frightening month, January of 2017, we invite you to send us poems of resistance, power, and resilience.

We will post every poem we receive unless it is offensive (containing language that is derogatory toward marginalized groups, that belittles, uses hurtful stereotypes, explicitly condones or implies a call for violence, etc.). After the Virtual Open Mic closes, we hope to print out and mail all of the poems to the White House.

For guidelines on how to submit poems for this call, visit the Call for Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience blog post. 

***

The Holy Temple of Drag
for Pulse

By Rasha Abdulhadi

I sweat out my fever that night

in the holy temple of drag,

watching my baby sister in a mustache and codpiece

invite us all to take a walk on the wild side,

wholly supplicant to the divine glamdrogyny

that could be called down to dance through you

if you could wrestle free enough

if you could accept into your heart the saving power

of glitter. and rock-n-roll. and rhythm-n-blues.

and stank nasty love songs sung along from every stall

in the gender neutral milk hotel

every friday, saturday, and sunday night

offering a new watermark on your excitement

Until this sunday,

                             when my fever was breaking,

and you were dying, you and your partner, you and your

mother, you and the bartender and bouncer and the 18 year old

girl dancing her heart out and I can’t understand

how you weren’t me or my sister

with our shaved-head glitter-eye swagger

                             or our friends, our drag sistren and brethren

in a neighboring state where we partied

in defiance of laws that tried to deputize and sanctify hate

                             and I wondered

if the fbi had baited a hook whose sharp sting

went sideways-- or worse, if that barb

landed right where aim sent it

none of us, blackbrownredyellowqueer

tongues embroidered by other languages,

have expected safety for a long time, if we ever could or did

I do not mistake police or politicians for my friends

no matter what the press statement says

My best allies have always been resistance. Rebellion

really brings out my eyes. I find courage

is a look anyone can pull off and sanctuary

exists only in the interstices we hold open for each other.

                             and I wondered too

if this was personal, a story about the hidden body

of the gay Muslim—as occluded as the twelfth imam

who one day prophesy says may return

perhaps then gentle in form as a rainstorm

whose lips fear no kiss.

                             and it seems that nothing

will feel like justice until we heal

and that I must give myself to my nieces and nephews

like a bridge.

                             My southern, my muslim,

my arab, my baptist, my palestinian, my buddhist, my queer butch eyeliner

families, hear me: my self feels like the battlefield over which the daily news is

fought, the truth spiraled downfield to mark gains

for one military or another

while I’m trying to hold the world inside my skin

and calling all my kin to hear how they’re hanging on.

                             and you—

you texted your mother that night

to tell her you loved her.

may I, on the night I die, with the best of my courage,

have the last words on my lips be

                             I love you. I love you world that broke me, I love you slaying  

                             hand, I love you betraying friend, I love you

                             family that would not see me, I do not fear you for I knew my silence

                             would not save me, make me invisible or hide me from surveillance

                             that can find, detain, deport, or execute me just as surely

                             as the hand of any man trying to terrorize my temple,

                             and so I will not surrender these sacred spaces

                             or let them become mute monuments. I am not here to hug any racist,

                             and even if we will never be safe:

                             it is you I am am pledged to, always.