FOR INSIDE ‘48/ HOW DOES █████ MAKE YOU FEEL?


 
 
 
After Monica Youn
 
I feel it every day. But I am lucky.
 
Do you visit it often?
 
No…10 years ago, once.
 
How do you define it?
 
I don’t watch news.
 
Do your parents visit?
 
Yes, once a week.
 
What do you do?
 
Burn charcoal, smoke argileh.
 
What do you want?
 
To be a teacher.
 
What have you learned?
 
To be ███.
 
Is there work?
 
Inshallah (no).
 
What are you worth?
 
My heart and my tongue.
 
 
 

Tarik Dobbs is a queer, Lebanese-American poet from Dearborn, Michigan. In 2018, he won a Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship, a Hopwood Undergraduate Poetry Award, and the Paul and Sonia Handleman Poetry Award for his collected poems. He also won the Projector Poetry Prize from Projector Magazine UK. His poems are forthcoming in diode poetry journal.