Your City
In your Cairo, Tamer, the generals fear another revolt. They are planning to abandon the city and are building a new capital in the middle of the desert to house all the government's thirty ministries and their staff. Everything in the new capital will be the tallest or largest in the Middle East and Africa. It will have a new airport, a monorail, hundreds of colleges, hospitals and schools, forty-thousand hotel rooms, a theme park four times the size of Disneyland, sensors for pollution, sensors for speed, and huge solar-energy farms. The plans do not include low-income housing, but certainly thousands of facial-recognition cameras to track and arrest potential troublemakers. The project will occupy six million acres of desert land. It will siphon water that had been slotted for other towns.
Where sands stretch far
away, Adam stands, thronged by
guards, adoring his towers;
his slaves milk his lean cows,
feed on
hard bread and brackish water.
Feature Date
- December 1, 2020
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“Your City,” from FUGITIVE ATLAS.
Copyright © 2020 by Khaled Mattawa.
Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
“In poems that tenderly call us to action, Mattawa awakens readers to the human and geographical devastation wrought by the tendency to ‘other’ people. Fugitive Atlas is a collaborative prayer for a shattered earth.”
—Ploughshares
“Khaled Mattawa’s arresting, dynamic new collection, Fugitive Atlas, maps and confronts the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the global refugee crisis through a wide range of speakers and rich braiding of forms, and the urgency of scope expands to include all of us.”
—Arthur Sze
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