June 24, 2025

TERROR COUNTER—Excerpts

by Fargo Tbakhi

Today, Mizna is honoring the launch of beloved contributor and Palestinian performance artist Fargo Tbakhi’s debut poetry collection TERROR COUNTER. This ambitious, experimental collection is, at once, a battle cry, a love letter, a reminder that we will die and that we are not dead. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes: “Through a variety of invented forms and stirring unravelings, these poems tunnel, excavate, eulogize, exclaim, and most elegantly imagine where we might go once we reject the dehumanizing gaze and obsessions of a crumbling empire and return to ourselves and to each other.” Purchase a copy of TERROR COUNTER here.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

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I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

—Fargo Tbakhi

Palestinian Love Poem

Something in me wishes for a dead cell
tower.
I’m a little grime. I’m arterial clogging.
Blister
on the tongue on skin You weren’t aware
could
blister. I puked up a drone today
warm
and stillbreathing. Necrosis of the giver
give
to all the grimes a gift: cleanness.
Up
the throat and toward fresh air. My
goodness
what a pretty taste. The interrogatory lawyer
bends
me over and his briefcase touches my
soul.
I’m a little filth. Blood of a good man
catch
it in my cupped hands. To drink You is to
know
who I will become. I’m a little pest.
Warbling
my little deathsong like a king’s
bane.
I swear I can see through myself tonight,
all
the way through to You, my watcher, my
sweet
interlocutor, silently workshopping
all
of my lines.

Gazan Tunnels (Through Yehuda Amichai’s “Sonnet”)

from “In the Knowledge That You Will Die, and I Will Die”

for my baba

And we will walk

Into nowhere

You with Your smallness and me with my smallness

The beach where we froze—were frozen—together

When the patrol officer held You he held You

When You held me You held me close

I answer the video call and Your hair has become white

Thin and vanishing—poverty—wraithlike—

Some incontrovertibility inside of us

And our times

I answer the video call smoking and You say You smoke now? then light up with me

The two of us and our cigarettes and distance

Stumbling along toward death

When my poems disintegrate You will remain in the documents of the court

When the courts disintegrate You will slip with me into anonymity

Where we began and where we looked for love

The indictment text holding You still and frozen

Where You are defending Yourself against the being-told-of

And You are named Defendant Last Name First Name

And You are named for me and I for You

The pages typed by somebody’s hands

Who listened around You shapeless in the clear light

I keep telling You about time

And what we need it for

Though I do not believe—

We find ourselves this morning in our capitols

Farther than a ship from safety

On the horizon line

Its vagueness and its cruelty

I have told Your story and You in Your way

You have told mine

You have told it to me

We tell each other the temperature and find that the numbers match

And I look for You in the white of my own hair

Its unexpected entrances

To miss each other’s funerals because of our difference

To have lost, finally, our eachness

To be, finally, no discrete things to be legislated

I wander through the ghosts of Your hair

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

And here You tell me I am whole and wholly Yours

And here I tell You I let You go, again and again, each day

And here we are sweetly entangled and disentangling

Somewhere beyond the electronics store and its robberies

Your hair is becoming its own memory of itself

And Your jacket resides on me like a welcome tick

Drawing from me my life

My somewhereness and my penchants-for-

I, begging some God for illegibility

You, forgotten dream of instability

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