Men Who Seek Refuge in the Djinn
Tarik Dobbs
ISBN#:
# pages
Sample poem from Men Who Seek Refuge in the Djinn:
A GHOST (DJINN) STORY
winner of the Projector Poetry Prize
1.
I spent every Sunday in Saturday School
Tales in Qu'ran, no hijabs worn, nail polish abound
a reform mosque, All-American Muslims
I make Wudu in the marble-half showers
A djinn enters as there is no exit
perfectly-crafted squares in rows of wall
His presence sweeps under my ledge
water splashing onto my feet
Its fire warms me (the dirt)
pulling me from concrete tundra/Michigan
No wonder Shaytan comes from it, too
2.
I feel my sinuses clear
Warm-air and farm lands, the djinn shows me what flat
rooftops and green feel like: No bud
or roses. No apple blossoms but field of olive
trees and my grandfather's bones
The djinn stands before the stone
We grieve
It's disguise. Azrail, a goat, the one
they slaughtered for: my mother's seventh birthday
we cry, goat and I
Sky sets and the fire goes out
3.
By morning, I've summoned the djinn again
from a lighter I found
outside the BP gas station
We tease and smile and the djinn tells my history
through google image searches:
an anthropologist in the fields of the Amazon rainforest:
Claude Lévi-Strauss; zaddy
The djinn knows my wish:
to make out with a 30-something,
anthropologist from the 20th century
We slump down behind the ice ally of the BP and kiss
its lips, the morning star and mine, red
crescent
Now, I'm seventeen—
Embers leave the worst
smell in my burnt neck-
beard
4.
Stashing gum in my hoodie pocket, the corner store was emptier than usual
it was Eid, after all
Ayb, yes, but the attendant sold my 12 year old
friends loosies, besides ethics
are artificial, the djinn admits
It's why we are dirt and fire, not
right light or water
He pulls me through tile and concrete
to the core/my home
5.
I slide into the jittering 2002 Audi A6/
my father pulls up the passenger power lock, lets me in
His cheapo mechanic cut the car’s computer circuitry
Djinn-proof, eh?
My father, always 15 minutes late after school,
(sometimes he didn't come at all)
ate pepperoni pizza on weekends
while we drove,
its smell
I can only know microaggressions:
he added anchovies to the lard,
radiator waiting to explode,
haram, to release the flameless fire
back into my home
6.
"I regret the day your lovely carcass caught my eye" - John Grant
The record spins and the djinn steps in—
His fire reflects in my pupils.
I speak brusquely:
Why have you come to me?
The djinn slides out of my dresser without a word
He stands 5'9, dark eyebrows like mine,
a dented nose
pipe-in-hand, and tortoise eyeglasses,
skin to stovetop, he briefly
holds my hand/lights his pipe
like candle light, but nothing more
7.
The djinn shows my home with no doors and no hallways
No bedrooms, no kitchens, no
call-to-prayer alarm clock, just a frame
of wood in crumbling brick
It shows me before and after and now;
we see the other
djinn and the other me, and we
kiss one last time
Tarik Dobbs is a queer, Lebanese-American poet from Dearborn, MI. 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. His poems are forthcoming or recently appear in diode poetry journal, Tinderbox, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.