One morning a charred ink line

   in the botanist’s notebook:

after the invasion, a garden planted in Cairo.

   The French army recording the distance

between beast and cotton seed.

   Napoleon had wings, flew as Mercury above the pyramids

a sprig of blue inventing atmosphere.

   The text speaks it and so it becomes

image and imagine and the people beneath;

   pool of statives beating
   know known know known.

One morning my birth is an ink line

   in the language of plantations.

I grow to watch the memory assemble me:

   a fiction of poppies and idolatry,

gradient in supernumerary fervor,

   bloody at the footnote. There is a door that betweens

me and then, the authors say the door is always open,

   the ghosts say the door is not for us.

I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but digs holes in the earth, plants trees, buries his shadow. The country hates him and hates me too, a little less, because I have papers. A document is a strange thing. To ask the placenta for its numerical origin. To tell the dirt it belongs to you. Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers. I call it my life. This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something. You are alive among flesh explained back to us as furniture. Hope is a tax. Each word—say it aloud—I am here—is a coin, a debt owed to love. Take the echo seriously. Our living is the plot to sing completion. Let it fill you, let it bruise. Greet the stranger: did you know we share a wick?

Listen to Zaina Alsous reading
Description de l’Égypte.

Listen to Zaina Alsous reading
To a Young Poet.