To further support Action Books’ growing community of writers and readers, we’ve decided to launch a new initiative on the Action Books Blog. Selected by our editorial staff, a recurring series called Action Fokus will highlight excerpts from 12+ radical manuscripts submitted by poets and translators during our 2022 Open Reading Period. Today we are featuring excerpts from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s TERROR COUNTER.

 

TERROR COUNTER acts against the languages constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians. Through experimental forms and an explosion of the lyric voice, the book enacts a way of meaning-making which makes space for a contemporary Palestinian poetic that escapes subjecthood and the strictures of colonial texts. It moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from lyric to visual poem to all-caps queer ecstatic, to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in the collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation, in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode which facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life. It is a project of desperation, animated by a reaching towards others despite and around the linguistic, political, and material circumstances keeping us apart.

-Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

 

 

 

 

from Terror Counter

everything is extricable. 

nothing is extant. 

we are an i. we are a door. 

we are locked. 

all our means of relation
disappear into the grind. 

the grind is he who slicks my oil
throat. 

i am hijacking every thing.
watch: I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.
I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.
I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. 

the feeling of fear is a good one.
half-shaped, we tumble from the
politic’s mouth. the giant picks
us up, peers at our oilskins, our
yesterday muscles. the giant
returns us to the grind. dandruff
speckles from my skull and each
fleck is a drone, warning the
bathers of a shark which cannot
end and does not stop. what it is
to count the state of our forever.
to receive a grant for the way
my beard does or does not
engender fear, my handful of
dust. to regulate the fingers of
each pore, the language of my
wildness. the blood flowing like
a trade caravan. i am invaded
by blood which wields a razor,
which tames my wildness. i am
hairless now, smooth as a baby’s 

neck. 

a baby’s neck. a baby. a baby. a
baby’s neck. a baby wailing
forever. interred in rock. soot. a
baby’s fingernails, too small to
offer protection to any power.
inside the poem trapped. frozen
into submissions. transfers of
meaning. terror and light.
cemeteries of courts. bled for a
dollar. my page count of sorrow.
ironically poisoned no honesty
left. songs inside letters hands
inside wells. the wail of it a path
i seek to follow. the wail of it
singing: I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.
I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.
I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.
I. I. I. I want

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An American Writes a Poem,

sells it to a university magazine run by exploited graduate students.
A different American sees the poem online
and buys the magazine for $22.95. Of this a small percentage
to the university, little to nothing to the graduate students, whose union
is fomenting daily, and with the certainty of mold.

The university courts an endowment from a conservative billionaire.
Certainly says the billionaire and drafts a quick proposal for an endowed chair
of the study of international relations through the lens of finance. The chair will
in the next year recommend a strong legal and policy response to the growing movement
for a popular boycott of Israel, which an undergrad will be surveilled
and suspended for supporting.

The billionaire files his taxes, paying roughly .5% of his declared income.
In the night his teeth grind lightly as cruelty works through his system like moss.
He will wake with no memory of his dreams, which were Artaudian, prophetic.

The billionaire’s taxes go towards the production of this year’s slate of U.S.
weaponry, and are pocketed by the financiers of major capital, their defense
contracts quietly renewed. At a banquet the financiers begin to vomit,
the shellfish revolting.

A percentage of this weaponry is bundled into an $800 million arms deal
with the state of Israel. A new kind of infringement on life is dreamt up,
written down, and revised, to be voted on summarily.

The arms deal pays for the restocking of an arsenal depleted
during the last escalation of genocide. The arsenal receives a fresh supply:
some 10,000 M16 A-1 rifles, 350 M-204 grenade launchers, 200 M-2 .50 caliber
machine guns, and an assortment of .30 caliber, .50 caliber,
and 20mm ammunition, among others whose names have been redacted by the linguists.

These weapons are dispersed among the various branches of Israel’s occupying forces,
who are as a matter of citizenship required to take part in the military front
of the genocide. A routine settler, once they have fulfilled this requirement,
begins to serve on one of the other fronts: ideological, academic, cultural,
culinary, linguistic, political, social, economic, and the front of the dreaming.

One of the soldiers, issued a rifle which fires black sponge rounds,
introduced in 2015, heavier and thus more lethal than typical sponge-tipped rounds,
which are classified by the occupation forces as nonlethal
despite evidence to the contrary,
clambers into his AIL Storm border police Jeep
produced by Automotive Industries Ltd on a Chrysler license,
and scrolls on his phone as the Jeep rumbles towards Al-Ram.

He sees the poem. He reads its lines to himself silently.
They enact something about grief, in his first language. He thinks
about Brooklyn. He screenshots the poem before clambering
out of the Jeep to aim at the youths throwing stones,
most of which are likely repurposed rubble from bombed buildings
previously understood by some to be homes.

Irritated, the soldier fires a black sponge round into a child’s chest,
which causes massive internal bleeding that will later cause the child,
my cousin Muhyee, to die.

This is the place analysis ends.

The soldier will go home and surrender to the dream of militant preservation.
He will never think of this day again.

I will think of this day constantly.
Imagining and reimagining the round
hurtling through the wind, as again an American poem
just breaks somebody’s heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Olive Tree Pastoral

“They mean something,
these family gnarls, twisted
angels. Each branch might be
a lesson in history, that object
of weight and recourse. Each
olive a divine spirit of a young
boy, hurling a stone, hurled away
himself, from a nation too heavy
to hold him up. The roots of the olive tree
grow deep, stronger than any metal, holding
all of us to the land with them. Oh, leaves
of mercy, great brown guardians of the field,
shading the hills where our forefathers
sweat, where our foremothers baked
bread to feed a people, oh little spheres,
worlds pulped down to oil which coated
a young woman’s throat, so she might yell
a chant so angry she burst
into bloom,”

I recite to the American art curator. She holds my hands, her eyes solemn, wet with wonder and pity. “Yes,” she says, “beautiful, so beautiful. Thank you for your words.” She will now go home and forget about me, until I email to remind her to send in the recommendation letter for the grant to which I’m applying, which I will not get, but will be honored to be a finalist for. I walk out of her gallery, clutching my poems to my chest, stepping on concrete and passing a grove that I don’t look at, and that doesn’t look at me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gazan Tunnel Through Yehuda Amichai’s “Sonnet”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gazan Tunnel Through the Balfour Declaration

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: PROPOSITIONS

 

 

 

 

DIRT IS A TAUTOLOGY

WATER IS A PALLIATIVE

SLINGSHOT IS AN IDEOLOGY

CACTUS IS A MARXISM

SEA SALT IS AN INTERNATIONALISM

HUNGER IS A NEOCOLONIALISM

ELECTRICITY IS A DISPLACEMENT

ANEMONES ARE A SOLIDARITY

FISHNETS ARE A COLLECTIVISM

DIRT IS A COLLECTIVISM

MARTYRDOM IS A MATERIALISM

COUSIN IS A MATERIALISM

PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM

FUTURISM IS A PALLIATIVE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: WORK

 

 

THE FUTURE CALLS MY SECRET NAME
I HEAP MY HEARTS IN PILES!
THE DREAM OF EARTH REVEALS TO US
THE SONG OF ROTTING SETTLERS!

THE SMOKE DRIFTS GODWARDS
AND MAKES A SHAPE LIKE LEILA
HIJACKING SUN SONG!

WE MAKE GREEN HEAVEN WITH OUR TONGUES!
EARTHDREAM SINGS INTO MY MOUTH
PALESTINE IS FUTURE’S NAME!
OUR LABOR IS A GODLABOR!

A SOIL FOR OUR GROWING HURT
AN ANTIEXODUS OF DIRT
WE RAMPAGE THROUGH THE AIRWAYS OF
CAPITAL WE BLOCK ITS BREATH!

THE STENOGRAPHER
IS EASY TO KILL— AND THEN
MY FATHER BREATHES OH:

00000000000000000WE WORK LIKE SEA QUEENS!!!!!

WE’VE GOT BETTE DAVIS EYES!!!

0000000000000000000000000000000WE’RE HALFWAY TO GOOD!!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Terror Counter

curves of wanting
You

slush funds

of shame

the air
marshal’s suspicious

thigh

my object
of desire-revulsion

masturbating i receive
a notification

22 dead

in gaza border
clash

a blue surge of
wrongness

the size of a meatball o
what an informant my skin

every blush
an admission:

how i want to be stripped
searched

touched by a ray
on the inside
some way

they say doesn’t hurt
but it does

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a queer Palestinian performance artist, a Taurus, and a cool breeze. Find more at fargotbakhi.com.