Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

INDICTMENT FILM
after Solmaz Sharif

and my mother playing me Fast Car
while somewhere my father tries to be
an animal somebody can tame
his hair thin as a wraith now and my mother’s
falling out in clumps like snow
and my hands caressing my own head
while i shave it losing my hair to be close
to my baba to be at peace with him to know
him beyond his own afterimage beyond
the indictment text even when it speaks
in my mother’s voice and this the only document
i can find of my family my baba only
defendant and never any tenderness to taste
and my mother whiter than poison tenderer
than brussels sprouts while i write towards
something, anything wilder than my self
towards some animal which won’t be
and my mother cleaning toilets and my father
blessed with unanonymity in eyes which won’t
see him hands that won’t touch his beauty
and i am asking for love in all the wrong pages
and i am a document of some tenderness beyond
any text of power my baba dying my mother dying
and all of us weeping and no one stops watching
and i am talking about a revolution sounds
like a whisper

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Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (he/him) is a queer Palestinian-American performance artist. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he is a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow and works at Mosaic Theater. His writing has appeared in Foglifter, Mizna, Peach Mag, the Shallow Ends, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere.