THE VOID IS THE SHAPE OF THE HOMELAND IN MY HEART

I’ve started smoking weed again. Cigarettes too.

I lit up one in Portland, surrounded by Arab girls.

The cigarette smelled like home, which is to say:

It smelled like the balconies in Libnan.

Plastic chair, watermelon, generator exhaust, benzene.

I wear two necklaces on my neck:

Beirut’s cedar tree and a small gold heart intertwined with a larger one.

My father gifted the latter to my mother years ago.

I wear it to remind me what I move toward.

I slow the world down when I’m high.

It becomes darker, lighter, sharper. Like me.

My hands slips around my lover’s arm.

We walk through the park. Talk of revenge and conspiracies.

Wear bravado, then unleash it. Let it down.

He wears his homeland on his belt.

I pass the rolled cigarette back to him. We exhale together.

Remember to live in the world, not just survive it.

For Latif Al Ani

“Latif Al Ani (1932 - 2021) is considered the founding father of Iraqi photography.”
Gallery Isabelle¹

Euphrates river. Cattails. Marsh.
Bloom out of water. Brown hands
on the oars. Cairo smoking in the distance.
The people are losing their rivers to heat,
to pollution. This is the last time
he rides the river before sandstorms
engulf the city, before he grows tired.

His hand always to the shutter
moving through the world 120mm
at a time. Not as a method
of domination, weapon, colonization–
but as a form of witness
documentation, love.

That is the kind of life I am building
every day. To give somebody
more than what was given to you,
to linger in someone’s memory,
even once I no longer walk this Earth.

¹ https://www.ivde.net/artists/58-latif-al-ani/

Hana Saad is a Lebanese-American writer based in Phoenix, AZ by way of Tulsa, OK. She received an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. Her work is featured in Mizna and has been supported by the Arab American National Museum and Tin House. She urges you to support the liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people in small and big ways. Connect with her on Instagram at @hanaxsaad or say hello at hana-saad.com.