Samia Saliba

labor day

at the bar, sweating antibiotics

into your modelo. showing you

pictures of red linoleum

on my phone. imagining the

excesses of homeownership.

there, a carrot, and there the

mules. every day, we go to

work. minister to our small

and nasty desires. i dream

about three of your fingers

in my mouth. sometimes

it’s enough. it’s got

to be.

COMMODITY ORIENTALISM

            after Khalil Gibran

On a box of Aesop creams my husband gets for free, a fake Khalil Gibran quote —

Beauty is not in the face. Beauty is a light in the heart.

On Figueroa, Egyptian cotton shirts sold for $128 to people who look beautiful

for a living. What Gibran really said was beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

On the internet, beautiful people listening to Arabic music to drown out the sound of needs

in Arabic. A German man heard Arab wails and found them beautiful. He made a killing.

In Anthropologie, searching the beauty aisle for bath salts to give my mother,

the salt of the Dead Sea haunts each bottle. Beauty is not in a bottle but in the pillage.

Or else: Beauty is not a need, but an extracted value. When I lit my heart,

I became ugly. Carved the organ from my neck which wants anything clean & fragile.

On instagram, a post that says Hot Girls Support Palestine shared by thousands.

When I was ugly it was not to negate politics but to dream.

What Gibran really said was Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror. But you

are eternity and you are the mirror.

The mirror is a commodity manufactured in North America, made by adding a reflective coating

to a polished substrate. But you are the mirror and the mirror is ugliness.

People of Orphalese, I dreamed an eternity where ecstasy was not a need

but a truth. Where our eternity was free of value.

In the city center, a monastery where mirrors are forbidden.

Will you weep with me at the absence of beauty,

or the absence of ugliness? I have never known the difference.