Arab Men Don’t Cry, My Father Says
Andrew J. Calis
On Google Maps, I drink them in, these names
that swim in sounds: Ramallah, alZa’im,
places where real people live. My dad
has lived there, has felt his history tugging
at him like a leash, visited
the Dead Sea (on my screen, a thick blue slug).
Nothing lives there, Dad says. The salinity
ten times that of the ocean. The Dead Sea.
Years away, I cannot see what he saw.
How do I sense it? Vendors on the street,
knafeh fresh and warm, the feces
walled in with burning garbage.
These things he saw
exist somewhere.
I’m pulled toward them by sounds
I cannot understand: Amman and Gaza,
in his voice, the smile he has kept within,
surviving in these places, still alive,
outliving violence. A ten minute drive
that took two hours:
the checkpoint guards held him
up.
The walls of memory come down
like rubble, splinter like a broken door,
and his eyes freeze with fear.
I forget
the rest, he says. That was years before
I left. But Jericho? Ofra? Efrat?
No. He’s finished now. Quietly, I let
his eyes move elsewhere.
The sea recedes from the shore.
that swim in sounds: Ramallah, alZa’im,
places where real people live. My dad
has lived there, has felt his history tugging
at him like a leash, visited
the Dead Sea (on my screen, a thick blue slug).
Nothing lives there, Dad says. The salinity
ten times that of the ocean. The Dead Sea.
Years away, I cannot see what he saw.
How do I sense it? Vendors on the street,
knafeh fresh and warm, the feces
walled in with burning garbage.
These things he saw
exist somewhere.
I’m pulled toward them by sounds
I cannot understand: Amman and Gaza,
in his voice, the smile he has kept within,
surviving in these places, still alive,
outliving violence. A ten minute drive
that took two hours:
the checkpoint guards held him
up.
The walls of memory come down
like rubble, splinter like a broken door,
and his eyes freeze with fear.
I forget
the rest, he says. That was years before
I left. But Jericho? Ofra? Efrat?
No. He’s finished now. Quietly, I let
his eyes move elsewhere.
The sea recedes from the shore.
Andrew J. Calis is an Arab-American poet, teacher, and husband, and an overjoyed father of four. His first book of poetry, Pilgrimages (Wipf & Stock, 2020), was praised by James Matthew Wilson for having ‘the intensity of Hopkins’ and for ‘layer[ing] light on light in hopes of helping us to see.’ His work has appeared in America, Dappled Things, Presence, Convivium and elsewhere, and he teaches at Archbishop Spalding High School in Maryland.
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