Milena Williamson | April 2021

Philip Metres

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (essays, 2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (poems, 2016), Sand Opera (2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (translations, 2015), and others. His work has garnered a Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Prize, Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” Lawrence Joseph has written that “Philip Metres’s poetry speaks to us all, in ways critical, vital, profound, and brilliant.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. A professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University, he lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Metres’s fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

Milena Williamson: Let’s begin at the beginning, with the title of your latest book, Shrapnel Maps. After looking up “shrapnel” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I learned that the term came from Henry Shrapnel, a British army officer, who invented what was otherwise known as the spherical case shot. I wonder how the etymology of “shrapnel,” its transformation from a name into a weapon, might reflect some of the concerns in your book? Names or naming are central to Shrapnel Maps and its cartography of violence. What may be the relationship between names/naming and violence?

Philip Metres: Milena, these questions strike to the heart of the matter. Names are not inherently violent, but they’re also not neutral. Who gets to name, and who gets named? In the case of the place we know by various names—Israel, Palestine, Holy Land, Canaan, etc.—each name is not just a name, but a doorway into a whole architecture of narratives and realities. Say Israel and get whisked into one reality, say Palestine and you’re in another one. The trouble, of course, is that those realities are mapped onto the same place. On old maps, there is a key to understanding the map: a legend. The problem is that the legend nearly always tells a single story. A single story is a dangerous story. The violence comes when a hegemonic story begins to erase the other stories, and, with it, the people who hold it dear. The title of the book, Shrapnel Maps, attempts to capture the polyphony of the book—how maps (invariably authored by the West) set up violent conditions that take apart local and national realities. The maps shrapnel, and shrapnel maps result: in language and in life.

Williamson: An idea you suggest with one of the book’s epigraphs, from the Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish: “—I don’t get the meaning” “—Nor do I, my language is shrapnel.”

Metres: That’s right, and Darwish is certainly one of the muses for this book, whose existence was defined by the new state of Israel as a “present-absent alien” when he and his family fled Birwe, north into Lebanon, and then returned as refugees before the border had hardened. What sort of poetry proceeds from a person whose very existence is a “present-absence”? As in Sand Opera, and in really everything I’ve written, I’ve always been interested in rendering visible the nexus between huge political decisions and systems and the lived experience on the ground by those who bear their brunt. A map is drawn in another country, and, suddenly, bulldozers come to build a wall between a village and their olive orchard. It’s Colonialism 101. One rabbit hole for this question that I won’t go down too far is to consider the British role in encouraging the Zionist movement—from the Balfour Declaration through the appointment of Herbert Samuel, and onwards. As in Northern Ireland, India, and South Africa, the British Empire needs to be held to account. Another rabbit hole is to acknowledge how Christian Zionism also played (and continues to play) a significant role in the erasure and displacement of Palestinians.

Williamson: I’d say this is an excellent first attempt, not only at answering my questions, but also at illuminating the many big questions in Shrapnel Maps. So what are the dangers of divergent single stories that contradict one another—as you say, Israel in one reality and Palestine in another—and how do these one-sided narratives differ from polyphony? Specifically, I’m thinking of something Ciaran Carson once said, how mapping “tends toward a kind of entrapment,” and ultimately, “danger therefore lies in the impulse to replace the oppressors’ map with your own mirror-image of it; this may merely replicate, and so confirm, the original labyrinthine entrapment.” How does one break the cycle of making maps and mirror-image maps, of replacing one legend with another, of victims becoming oppressors?

Metres: I think of Darwish’s lines from Journal of an Ordinary Grief: “What is homeland? The map is not the answer.” Maps are not the answer to the question of belonging. Yet, it’s clear that the practice of mapping and countermapping are ways of visualizing territory and realities that are sometimes difficult to see. Take the “Visualizing Palestine” project, and its attempt to map “a rights-based narrative,” using data science and technology. For me, the point is not to dispense with maps and visualizations (no one interested in power or justice should), but to be attentive to what maps can’t see. On another plane of narrative, Israeli and Palestinian historians collaborated in an attempt to create a single binational history. They failed to do so, but ended up creating a text called Side by Side, which includes on opposite pages two ways of telling the same story. At least they’re within a single spine. They each acknowledge that there’s another way of seeing and telling these stories. In an interview, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan said:

We have many civilizations in this place…. and if we accept that we are the conclusion of all of these histories, the narrative will be clearer. Some start history with the Battle of Ajnadayn, when the Muslims invaded Palestine 1,300 years ago, as if there is no history before that. This ignores 10,000 years. The Israelis start with the Hebrews’ journey to Palestine. They ignore what happened after and they ignored what happened before…. It will never end that way. If you want to belong to this place, you have to belong to all of its history and respect 10,000 years of several civilizations.

Zaqtan calls us to a wider memory, and a wider sense of belonging, where no one is erased by another’s dream of a place. So Ciaran Carson is correct that the danger is simply replacing one hegemony with another. No doubt, that is what Protestant Unionists fear about a united Ireland; will we be subject to the same secondary status that we subjected the Catholic/Nationalist/Republicans to in Northern Ireland? Or worse, will we be subject to the same attacks that our ancestors bore during the settlement, and over the centuries, by the Irish Republican movement? Will we ever be safe if we’re not in charge? These are the same questions that fuel the Zionist imagination: although we are in charge in Israel, aren’t we surrounded by those who wish us to disappear or die? Should we forget Shoah, the pogroms, the Persian rule, the Babylonian exile, the Roman oppression, etc.? These fears are easily justified, given the history. I’ve been thinking a lot about how that very narrative (as with every name) is a reduction as well as a realization. There’s no way around it. Shrapnel Maps is inspired by practices like Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntalism, where the work of the intellectual (or, in my case, artist) is to be able to bring together, in counterpoint, these different realities, narratives, maps, and names—not to render a false equivalence, given the radical asymmetry in power between the Israeli state and Palestinians—but to imagine a way that Israelis and Palestinians can be held together in relationship, a dream of a wider sense of belonging, where one’s belonging doesn’t exile another’s.

Williamson: In the first poem, there is a neighborly dispute about a tree: whether it should be saved or torn down, and who has the right to tear it down. While the speaker’s wife is adamant that the tree should be preserved, the speaker seems inclined to keep the peace: He thinks, “Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade.” I am fascinated by this moment, which considers—what are one’s responsibilities to people and what are one’s responsibilities to the people we love? What are the dangers of separating people into those categories? I’m thinking of this how moment echoes throughout the book to another moment with another neighbor. When the speaker asks why his daughter cannot play with the Orthodox Jewish neighbor’s daughter, the neighbor says, “My wife… she grew up only around our kind.” What’s the dialogue between these two poems?

Metres: Shrapnel Maps is a definitely a book obsessed with the question of neighborliness. Not only who is my neighbor, but what do we owe our neighbors? Growing up in the Catholic tradition is where I first heard this question articulated, and the ethical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Both, it turns out, are difficult loves. For some, it’s hard to love our neighbor. For others, it’s hard to love ourselves. Both are necessary but sometimes come in conflict. It’s also true that the speaker (who is also some reflection of me) seems to prefer a kind of peace that seems to be conflict-avoidance. He would give something up rather than struggle for it. In a way, that’s a failure to love oneself. In the three religions of the Book, and, indeed, perhaps at the core of every religion, is the question of how we welcome the stranger, the other. The Torah calls the people to welcome the stranger thirty-six times, more than just about any other commandment. The Qu’ran also speaks about hospitality; after all, these three religions emerge from a desert culture where hospitality was not an affectation. It was a necessity to stay alive. The great Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes that “To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.” To encounter the other is to risk vulnerability. In that vulnerability, that openness, is something that is found in few places.

That said, every religion also contains the opposite of this welcome of infinity. Exclusionary interpretations of faith come out of fear and shut people out from each other, and, arguably, from The Infinite. In the case of the second poem, I imagine that my particular neighbor was trying to observe kashrut, to keep her house kosher, and having my daughter there made it difficult for her. It caused me pain to see my daughter excluded. But it’s also possible that this response comes out of a history of violence against Jews, a deep distrust of the non-Jew. When I told this story to a Jewish friend, the look on his face was horror and shame. I have felt that same shame hearing “traditional” Catholics sometimes talk about LGBTQ+ people, a woman’s right to choose, or religious traditions.

Williamson: I can relate to this given my own complicated feelings about Judaism; I have long struggled with what it means to be half-Jewish, both personally and in relation to various Jewish communities. For example, how am I meant to feel when I’m told to “marry Jewish” given my very existence depends on my mother’s defiance to do just that. What does it mean for me to identify as half-Jewish when, according to Jewish customs, I am undeniably and fully Jewish as determined by the matrilineal line. Perhaps my complicated Jewish identity explains why I so love the poem “[The Daily Contortions]” in which, after some initial reluctance, the speaker’s daughter Adele receives a piece of pretzel from the Jewish neighbor because “Adele’s almost Jewish...Aren’t you, Adele?” In 2015, when I traveled to Israel on Birthright, I encountered a kind of orthodox rhetoric that I never had before. I was deeply unsettled to hear people my age who were American, but had grown up in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York City, talk about Israel as home. When I asked about the parallels between Native Americans and Palestinians, I was dismissed. How could some narratives of colonialism be condemned while others were rationalized? A rhetorical question I know… the blind spots of one’s own identity, I believe.

Metres: Thanks for sharing that about your own journey. We’re all on journeys to understand. One of the things I hope that Jewish readers get out of Shrapnel Maps is the sense that their suffering is seen and heard—the suffering of a long history of persecution, of an ongoing situation of precarity in a world where antisemitism is a very real threat, and the pain of struggling to belong. But recognizing that precarity doesn’t mean erasing Palestinian realities and Palestinian dispossession. I realize that there may be discomfort for some readers in recognizing Israel is not a state beyond reproach. I once had a public talk canceled in Cleveland because the title of the talk was “The Colonial Dimension of Israel/Palestine.” Without even knowing the content of my talk, there was a huge outcry about it. Even the thought of Israel and colonialism in the same sentence was too much to bear. Yet, given the oppression of Palestinians, we must not only examine the colonial context of Israel, but raise our voices against its depredations, its erasures, its legalized violence. The Nakba, or the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of 450 villages from 1947–1949, has never really ended. Yet in Shrapnel Maps, I also wanted to highlight the work of courageous Jews who have acted in solidarity with their Palestinian neighbors, people like Rabbi Arik Ascherman and Jeff Halper.

Williamson: Unfortunately, that sounds all too like the heart of America’s current political difficulties—refusing to engage with material that might be challenging or upsetting, even if the refusal is a method of self-preservation, still means a lost opportunity for dialogue.

Metres: I agree. The divides are everywhere, and the polarization is as fierce as I can remember. This book’s ostensible subject is Palestine/Israel, but it’s about the predicament of every nationalism, every people writing a story about a place. It’s also about America. Writing this made me want to delve into the erased histories of the places I’ve lived in the States, the missing indigenous cartographies and stories, the class and racial divides in our cities, and between our cities and the country—all the ways that people are segregated from each other.

Williamson: You mentioned that you hope Jewish readers may take away from Shrapnel Maps the sense that their suffering is heard. I also found myself wondering what Jewish readers might take away from the book. I could imagine a pro-Israel voice (based on those whom I’ve met, even those in my own family) saying, “Yes we are seen and heard in these poems, but we are not seen and heard enough,” which perhaps suggests a dangerous slippage between “enough” and “exclusively”—a difficult boundary to maintain for anyone who has suffered so much.

Metres: I’m looking forward to what dialogues that Shrapnel Maps helps usher, particularly from Jewish readers. What you describe, of course, is a concise version of the Palestinian/Israeli predicament. Two peoples—(Palestinian) Arabs and (Israeli) Jews—who have experienced a history of oppression, marginalization, and erasure. Both—in different ways, of course, have been wronged. Palestinians would rightly remind me that the asymmetry of power makes such equivalency false and dangerous, and Jews would rightly remind me of the history of their vulnerability. Both strive to be seen, to be recognized, and to recognize themselves in the way their stories are being told in the world. The problem, as you note, is when the narrative that one holds necessitates the erasure of the other. Narratives, when they fall into the “single story” trap, can be enormously violent. In some sense, the lyric impulse insists on particularities that the single story cannot suffocate.

Others would say, as well, that playing the representation game is a trap. There is never a perfect representation. On some level, representation always misses, ossifies, and diminishes. This is perhaps why some poets (and sometimes whole coteries and even generations of poets) decide to move into abstraction, or reject persona poetry, or the imagination, or metaphor—as an attempt to take an ethical and political stance in poetry. It helps explain various modernisms and postmodernisms, including Language Poetry. I understand that insofar as my poems attempt to represent the complex realities of Israelis and Palestinians, they participate in an imperfect project that has failure built into it. I cannot write perfect poems. I can only write poems. I have tried every means available to me to bring this reality closer to my own awakening. Still, the mimetic impulse is deeply human as well, and powerful. How important it is for people to see themselves and be seen in works of art! May I be forgiven for what I have failed to imagine, and may the book open further spaces for us to hear voices of freedom and justice that have been suppressed.

The two poems you mention, incidentally, come out of small incidents in my own life and neighborhood, which is predominately Jewish Orthodox. Instinctively, as an Arab American, I saw them as metaphors for the wider question of states and nations, of Israel and Palestine. Imagine if the stakes were not about a tree and a garden, or a child entering a home, but a refugee and a former refugee, or a farmer separated from their olive orchard?

Williamson: For me, some of the most powerful lines in Shrapnel Maps come from the poetic sequence “Theater of Operations.” In this section, a set of parents describe the death of their son in a suicide bombing, and their subsequent decision to donate his organs, to “resettle in alien skin,” some parts of him:

…& now inside “the enemy” you rise behind the lines of inside / you live
& see for yourself what none of us can see ourselves / ourselves from the outside

The harrowing nature of this image hovered in my mind for days after reading. Would you elaborate a bit on it? I also wonder if this passage could be a philosophy of poetry, perhaps your poetry specifically, which so empathetically examines painful histories, the erasure of “what none of us can see.” Your poetry, like a prism being turned in the light, reveals “ourselves / ourselves from the outside.”

Metres: I found writing “Theater of Operations” incredibly difficult, but vital to the fabric of Shrapnel Maps. Because I knew the arguments for armed resistance as a right to those under military rule, and because I’d seen and known the suffering of Palestinians, I could feel in myself an emotional distance toward Palestinian attacks against Israelis. I could never approve of them, but I sensed I could be lulled into a rationalization of them as a mere consequence of oppression and injustice. What I wanted to do, by writing that sequence, was to look into the heart of the darkness of violent resistance, to refuse to separate myself from its great harm (both individual and social injury, to Israelis and to Palestinians). I researched and read everything I could about Palestinian paramilitaries, with a particular emphasis on the dread tactic of suicide bombing that emerged with vicious regularity during the Second Intifada.

While all the poems in the sequence are inspired by real life events, the poem you quote is based on the story of Ismail and Abla Khatib, who donated their twelve-year-old son Ahmed’s body and organs to Israelis, after he was shot to death by an IDF soldier. When interviewed, the father said that “this kind of action is a form of resistance. Six Israelis have a part of a Palestinian in them, and we don’t think those people would come to kill a Palestinian person. And I don’t think their family members would kill a Palestinian child.”

I don’t think I need to explain the metaphor from the poem above, once you know the story. But I believe you’re right, that poem articulates the heart of what I was trying to do in the poems—to enact the moral imagination, to engage in a radical act of imaginative empathy that might itself be an absurd impossibility. My friend, the poet Solmaz Sharif, has argued strongly that empathy is always a sort of liberal colonizing endeavor—and she’s not alone in her critique. There is a provocative body of argument in psychoanalytic theory about identification as a devouring activity. So I’m not saying that I have any access to knowing how the other (or anyone else) actually feels to be themselves. But I’m trying to dilate my own feeling about what it might mean to be otherwise than myself, an,d in the process, become human in a way that I have not yet been.

Williamson: “To receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I,” as you quoted of Levinas earlier. Or as Muriel Rukeyser writes, “We would try by any means / To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, / To let go the means, to wake.”

Metres: That’s precisely what poetry can do. It can be a technology of waking, of receiving the other as neighbor.

Williamson: One of the ways Shrapnel Maps attempts a radically expansive representation is through the inclusion of artwork, specifically the Visit Palestine posters. Funnily enough, I encountered the original image for the first time in the summer of 2019 when I was staying in an Airbnb with my family. I should note that none of us were familiar with the backstory of the poster, although I have since done my research. My father, who is not Jewish, and I looked at the poster through a contemporary lens. We thought that by using the term “Palestine,” the poster was advocating for the country and the people living under Israeli occupation. It was clearly pro-Palestine, we said. On the other hand, my mother, who is Jewish, saw the poster as an idyllic image, one that used “Palestine” as the term for the ancient region that included the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. It was clearly pro-Israel, she said. I have since learned that we were both right and both biased, and nothing was terribly clear. Could you tell us more about the history of this image and perhaps some of the other images in Shrapnel Maps?

Metres: I love your parents’ polar reactions to the images! Of course, it’s both. I was astonished by these posters, which I discovered in a number of places online as I was researching the representations of Is-Pal particularly during the British Mandatory period (1920–1947). I found it intriguing how they appeared on both Palestinian sites—trying to reclaim the name Palestine—and Israeli sites, as vintage culture. They were made by a Jewish American commercial artist for a tourist agency during that period, alongside many other posters and postcards trying to encourage Jewish tourism and immigration. The images themselves are stylized, fantastical—not representations per se, but imaginative renderings. As with the poems, I’m interested in images that trouble and complicate, even when they appear clear. I could say more, but I want the readers to have a chance to wrestle with the images (some of which I’ve cropped and edited) and their implications.

Williamson: As a poet myself, I’m intrigued by the concept of merging multiple chapbooks (Returning to Jaffa, 2019, and A Concordance of Leaves, 2013) into a book. Could you talk about this process? Did individual poems change due to the new framework of this book? Or was it more about finding a way to slot poems together like puzzle pieces? What was the editorial process like at Copper Canyon Press?

Metres: I’ve been writing poems about the Palestinian/Israeli predicament for as long as I’ve been a writer. My first book of poems, To See the Earth, featured four such poems: “Letter to My Sister,” “The Familiar Pictures of Dis,” “Installation/Occupation,” and “Two States.” I’m surprised to see I’d written so many poems that would have been at home in Shrapnel Maps. I believe the first project that led me to think that I might write an entire book was “Theater of Operations,” written in 2009, as a series of sonnets dealing with a suicide bombing. Then came “Concordance of Leaves,” meditating on my time in (mostly) Palestine when my sister Katherine married Majed in a small village in the Jenin district. At some point, the mapping poems of “Unto a Land I Will Show Thee” emerged in the mid-2010s, and “Returning to Jaffa” came in 2019.

The whole concept of a chapbook as a unit has fascinated me. I’ve always been drawn to poetic sequences, serial poems, long poems—and a chapbook can be a brilliant sanctuary for such a singularity composed of parts. Invariably, I continued to revise those poems, condensing, revisiting, and repurposing, as they dialogue with other parts of the book. Shrapnel Maps is a double-album (165 pages). Michael Wiegers and Copper Canyon Press have embraced this book from the start and encouraged me during its growth in size and scope.

The order of the manuscript is complexly dialogic. As with Sand Opera, the book is not chronological in historical or compositional time. I hope that everyone reads the book—and really, all of my books—from beginning to end. To be honest, the structure is a bit of a mystery to me. I know I wanted to take myself and the reader on a journey of encounter, a series of engagements that will invite, bewilder, challenge, provoke, and provide some hope—even if it’s a “hope against hope.”

Williamson: In your book, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, you write: “Perhaps it’s true, as Seamus Heaney wrote, that ‘no lyric has ever stopped a tank.’ But as Dave Lucas once noted, we don’t know the futures that our poems create.” It’s an impossible question, I know, but what do you hope is the future that your poems will create?

Metres: I believe that poetry can be a technology to remember the past, but not be suffocated by it. To listen to the ancestors in the spirit world, but not worship them or be imprisoned by them. A technology to dream the future, but not be destroyed by it. To remember what we have not yet known. To accompany through the imagination and in reality the people in this world whose lives have been shattered by violence, injustice, and despair. Poetry as a dream space to wrestle the present and imagine past the past.

This is what John Paul Lederach suggests are the peacemaker’s disciplines in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace: “…the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence.”

Regarding the future of Israel/Palestine, Palestine/Israel, conversations tend to get reduced to whether the political solution is two states or a single binational state. It’s not for me to decide—that is for the people to work out. But I hope Shrapnel Maps not only invites new conversations, but also participates in a movement to transform US foreign policy. After all, the US provides nearly $4 billion a year of military aid to Israel, with no strings attached. That is scandalous. We need to hold our government accountable to hold Israel accountable.

In the end, of course, Palestinian statehood would not solve every problem. We have a planetary climate crisis that we all share, one that the poor and dispossessed will bear disproportionately. We all need to figure out new ways of belonging that are equitable, just, responsible, and sustainable. No flag will create potable water for people in Gaza. No national anthem will undo PTSD or raise the dead. No border guards will bake the bread. No tank can feed an infant at its breast, and no drone can teach literature or draft the floor plans of the imagination. Humans are better at surviving than loving, but perhaps poems can widen the circle of that love.

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Milena Williamson is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. She was the winner of the Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award in 2018. Her poetry has been published on RTÉ and in Magma, The Tangerine, The Honest Ulsterman, the Poetry Jukebox in Belfast, The North, Poetry Ireland Review, and more. www.milenawilliamson.com.

Excerpt

from Shrapnel Maps

Ismail & Abla to Ahmed, their son

your body full / of fragments / harrowed was thy brain
spilled over your clothes / you / already not

of this world / in the shadow of our difficult / we plant
your heart inside / a teenaged girl you will

never touch / liver we bury / in a baby you will
never raise / elderly you’ll never be / kidneys

we resettle in alien skin / your lungs now breathe
for two who could not breathe without you

we know your toy gun looked / death
in the eye but why / did they have to shoot you

twice / & now inside “the enemy” you rise
behind the lines of inside / you live

& see for yourself what none of us can
ourselves / ourselves from the outside
 

Future Anterior

13. What do you want others to know?

Tell them that we exist.
                                  That we exist,

even between the words of their text.

 

“Ismail and Abla to Ahmed, their son” and “Future Anterior” from Shrapnel Maps. Copyright © 2020 Philip Metres. Reprinted with permission from Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.