Tel Aviv – Mohammed Zenia

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Tel Aviv is where we touch the limit of witness and make a promise past it.  Witness: the seeing-eye dog of complicit, rooted in complicare — Latin for ‘fold together.’ Simone White says, “This modern world folds us together, envelops us in the color line.”

Tel Aviv is what we can’t un-know — what fucks with our intimacies even as it maps our complicated desire for a place in the world, or a place in language, or a home outside of Reason.

Tel Aviv is a love story.

What if all our joys & nostalgias, our longings for intimacy & home, our movements to forge & become an I are derived & dependent on continual relations of violence? Can we curb the desires Tel Aviv & global capital sew within—desires we might call american dream or bevy of fish, romance, gender, & touch—the fantasies of all settlers, complicit or otherwise? For Zenia, sources for world-building span dreaming to loving, poem-ing a way through, becoming other than pre-destined “pieces of shit.”

imogen xtian smith, Poetry Project Newsletter #263

Tel Aviv is poetry– a time capsule with markings from both the past and future. In this collection, Moh surveys the night with a Hedayat flashlight, accounting his mortal coil with the lithe rumblings of a sage’s narrative, folding over itself like a crepe, powdered with pure grit symbolism. Everything here is a twice-blooming rose.

C. C. Hannett, Editor-in-Chief, Rly Srs Lit

Cover image by Mohammed Zenia. Cover design by Nia Nottage.