George Abraham

well… *grabs wine glass* when the world ends, i hope we go down dancing ahha!

for RAWI and the Wet Hot Arab American Summer 2019 Cohort

this one goes out to all my potato-shaped people:
we’re beautiful in spite of Beauty.

we string ourselves to ceiling fans & fly
around your rooms like the heroes you needed

but didn’t deserve. we travel in packs
& egg all the stores in beverley hills—

we sleep on couches until we become
american as shit on a sidewalk.

we don’t clean up unless mama’s visiting.
a neck is a kind of bridge & we step all over

bridges. we re-plagiarize each other’s
photos & call it a triptych, dare

I say, a lineage—we re-invent Celine Dion
in 5 different keys & now she’s family.

we dabke to Britney Spears & call her
our love language: taste of poison

paradise. the only love worth dying for
is a love you can return to

and from—we clog toilets. we steal
mansions from white people. we burn

our desires beneath a cheddar moon & drink
rosé from bottles we can’t even pronounce—

we wail about it in a white girl’s accent—
we blend chickpeas into water & say you can’t

just aask the ha-miss why it’s israeli—let’s be honest
for a second, friends: we can never forgive

scarlett johansson for what she did to the sidewalk
that night; sorry not sorry, the moon doesn’t

speak your language, darling—sorry not
sorry, today is nothing less than

Catastrophe but, believe me, we’ll go down
singing our music this time – believe me

when I say we love the sound of our own
laughter. even as it chokes us to death.