TRIPTYCH WITH VARYING DEGREES OF CERTAINTY, POSED AS AN INTERRUPTED SESTINA
I. incomplete confessions of earth
or, your father contemplates his family history while outside of himself
yes, those were your 3amo’s hands
knocking the tiny tongue of a gun
chattering, in imprecise momentum,
while you trembled behind a splintered door—
your small-mouthed amygdala—sweating
backfired diamonds: a familiar anatomy.
your 3amo’s liver, a languid anatomy,
translated blood into language of hands,
crooked & rapid fire; his palms sweat
tiny oceans into chokehold, the gun
stained of coin & ghost of brother, come door’s
buck & shear, come ramshackle momentum
& neck twitch—your familiared momentum
beneath bulb’s flicker; your colorless anatomy
illuminated in coin count—the shop’s door
also in translation—dead in your white hands,
faces bulleted in metal. come glass & shatter & gun
pressed to your temple’s brief crater, sweat
-lined, the bullet. fathered. his hands: yes: their sweat
& shake of devil’s tongue: his and: your momentum:
wall-shocked: smoke of: your father’s: gun:
a punctuation mark: swelled into: intuder’s anatomy:
or was it your 3amo: leaking red: instead of his mother’s hands
in endless prayer, it was the shop’s closed door
that could not forget him: dead & white: door
with a penny-splintered amygdala, whose sweat
stained the air humid. your quivering hands
in restless autumn: you stared into a leaf’s momentum
& could not unsee the bloodshed of your own anatomy:
in truth, you couldn’t leave your poor mother by gun—
in truth, every man in your family was once a gun
cabinet: house of nickel bullet & mahogany door:
every footrail south, splayed with fibrous anatomies,
white on red: un-oceaned the musculature of its sweat:
a history, precise & calculated in its momentum,
remembered only in soil: the work of your own hands:
II. Against Honesty: a catalogue of imperfect endings
Because I had too many words in my mouth but none
of them were enough, I leaned into their incantation
like a spell of godless repetition to witness
my father held at gunpoint by a white nationalist,
or my father held at gunpoint by his own 3amo,
or the memories not being mutually exclusive—
all of them colored in sweat & momentum, gun &
door, but in truth, my grandfather was the only one
who fired, & sure, I can call that empire collapsing
into a single man, or I can call that immigrant collapsing
into empire’s choke, but I owe nothing to Truth, who
once considered our people nonexistent—tell me
you haven’t lied to construct an honest history,
or that they were just brothers on the wrong end
of a bruise, or ghost story, or digestible myth—
My Teita would tell his story like this: when he was
a child with grass knotted between his fingernails,
sweating every color in that tiny & wondrous anatomy
beneath a forgiving sun, the back door would swing wide
open, humming with fruit flies, & that momentum meant
summer had already begun, the shovels were already staked
in the yards, & it was during that season, when he tended
the garden of his neighbor—a dying woman who, come nightfall,
gifted him a single fern which, when planted, would erupt
into an ocean of hands in his backyard, & said let the land
remember every history we cannot inherit; how they sprawled into
a multitude—that wind, an endless, swaying music.
I don’t remember a time he ever laid a hand on me.
III. complete confessions of earth
or you contemplate his family history of self
yes: those hands: tiny guns: translated blood: into choke: anatomy
colorless: in translation: every man in your family was once:
un-oceaned: hands in endless prayer: the work of your own:
“Triptych with Varying Degrees of Certainty, Posed as an Interrupted Sestina” was reprinted with permission from the author. This poem can be found in Abraham’s 2020 collection, Birthright, available from Button Poetry.
George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and PhD candidate at Harvard University. They are a Kundiman fellow, and a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). Their debut poetry collection, Birthright, is forthcoming with Button Poetry in April 2020.