850 million tonnes & The Tradition

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

850 million tonnes

months of garbage into the sea, 850 million tonnes

last week, it rained in the city of Beirut, locals woke up to a river of trash

slithering between their houses it’s going into your sea?

it’s washing back up onto your beaches?

how awful this garbage, the collection company contract ended, it’s all free governance, corruption, mismanagement it’s all garbage filled streets

the old man on the side of the road, yelling “they threw it into our sea”

to no one scooters speeding by on small cobble streets

building an incinerator from scratch a separation of garbage at the source

a second separation a treatment of garbage and recycling

but what type what standards

what generation of incinerators new filters? old beat up Mercedes speed by

large puffs of smoke leaving behind grey air

the kids on the side of the road begging for better lungs

hands grey brown with dust

he says it requires continuous filtration

but our government is not trustworthy

they hold so many solutions non actionable

without the incinerator waste management can still happen

when burning everything the rest where is it gonna go

matter doesn't just disappear trapped in the air

in the lungs of old women on the coats of feral cats

in the skin of bananas infused in the oil of kahwa

Lebanese citizens already ahead of the government

many neighbourhoods recycle on their own expense

if there are incentives and trust many people are ready

we are always conscious of the danger of the situation

isn’t that the lebanese way

to sort your problems without relying

on your government?

it’s a postmodern state, he says to the foreign reporter on the radio

we know how to live without the state

and yet fear coats his next words within all this

Beirut is still charming a very hospitable city

please don’t stop visiting tourists line the beaches

rushing away in disgust British accents less and less present

he explains: low-rise buildings demolished replaced with luxury residential towers

owned by Lebanese expatriates or foreigners
often occupied only seasonally

fleeing their migrant countries

for a small whiff of garbage

the expert on the radio do not forget him urges top of his lungs now
like many problems we’ve gone through

there will always be a solution weakly, he promises

and we citizens are ready to fight for the basics

the civil movement is very well united

and working hard

we are united

no matter religion

or political affiliation

The Tradition

outside, near the depanneur on ogilvy

and hutchison, or close by on querbes and st-roch,
we walk slowly, head bowed down, out of bed
before we make it to the bend

in the road

this feeling of, will they fall out
won’t they fall out
like apples at the end

of the season

rotted inside, filled with bees
a thud as they hit the ground

or maybe they aren’t falling, a wrap around the chest
what are they if they are not actually there

no apples, no other fruit, the fall a tender season
before the challenge of incoming winter

if not, then what of this feeling of remembering
the absence pretending it is not absence, but something

like the way we cheese at our mom
show brushed teeth, scream finished, head off to bed, a minute early

or maybe the way a tree is only a tree if it is filled with lilacs
sometime in early june, the sound of you typing from the kitchen

the only way to remember you’re still around, but if not
something deeper, a chant we recite that sounds like it belongs

to church, but it doesn’t, a hymn deep in the tongue
rarely spoken by your mother anymore, if only to transition

centuries upon centuries of tradition into now

leaked down the family trees, a sap, perhaps this time, a cedar
or the apple tree on the end of your street, when you finally get home

lay on the couch with your head propped up, and wonder
how did I ever make it back here alive?

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, Carte Blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter @theonlyelitareq. Their book, knot body, was published by Metatron Press September 2020, and their upcoming poetry collection, The Good Arabs, will be published by Metonymy Press in 2021.