The Thing About Being In Love Is That by Omar Sakr
By Wasafiri Editor on February 14, 2020 in Poetry
I pray to god every morning to bury me first
& I simmer to boiling point with melodrama.
I keep it one hundred with sensation, music,
oddities. Yesterday I called even a poem habibi.
I licked the hardwood floors that held a memory
of your feet. I sucked on the bulb of the sun
outside because it dared to know your hair,
& to prove you out-delicious even the light.
I walked past the rotting hydrangeas in the yard
and anointed the browning blue habibi
on the way to see Tolouli, who has owned
that word for as long as anyone I know—
do you see how love calls to love? Habibti
do you see how it gathers itself like rain?
It’s not the most intimate dialogue
hbb is casual you know, a confetti endearment
and maybe this is why it is my favourite
the way it pours and hails out my mouth.
Inside my earliest memory of habib
two sweetly huge men kiss hello
ya habibi my uncles or cousins or strangers
I’m not sure, but I was small and knew
then that anyone could be loved, if
anyone excluded my body. Now I sleep
and behind my eyelids, a habibi waits.
At home, the couches, the table, the tea
pot, the bed, the last pregnancy test—all
I am trying to say is that since I met you
I darling the world.
Omar Sakr is the son of Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants, born and raised in Western Sydney. He is an award-winning bisexual poet, author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books), and most recently, The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press), which has just been released in North America through Andrews McMeel Publishing.
