issue 2
Koukash Review
2023
“We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.”
—Uri Lubrani, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960
To wait tables
for those
who can consume at any price what we cannot afford
who laugh about our dirt roads and by-ways of dust
who eat, ravenous for dessert, because their life is too short
while ours is too cold and too long
would not be as bad
as our walled deprivation.
To cut wood
for those
who build houses over our homes
that we have lost and cannot build again
for those
who know not the value of breath, our breath
would not be as bad
as the poverty of cement-floor beds.
To wait tables
for those
who excavate the soul’s geography
bulldozing over our meridians of stone and parched earth
to cut wood
for those
who build condos over our coffins
who devour latitude and longitude
mapping over our arid bones
who divert water leaving only tears to swallow
would not be as bad
as the poppies’ blood-red dance for rain in smoldering sand.
Micaela Kaibni Raen
Micaela Kaibni Raen is a Palestinian American queer femme-dyke, mother, multi-genre writer, visual artist, and activist. She grew up in the Little Arabia community in California and graduated from Chapman University. During that time, she became a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc., ACT UP! and Queer Nation. She has been a community organizer for over 35 years in North America and is committed to international human rights, especially that of Indigenous and displaced peoples, women, the HIV+/AIDS community, families living in poverty, LGBTIQ youth in foster care systems and LGBTIQ communities. Currently, she is working on a manuscript, Queer Tatreez, that styles poems in the cadence and structure of the intricate patterns of Palestinian Tatreez needle point, an Indigenous Arab cross stitch embroidery that has been passed down through many generations. The manuscript combines literary and visual art that are created to be experienced simultaneously. Her work appears in Bint el Nas; Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America; Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought; The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab American Writers; and El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Arab and Arabophone Anthology.