to get to be called a human

and then the rest of us

A few months ago, the kind people at Beyond Baroque asked me to write a poem on the theme of “the human touch.”

In thinking about “the human touch” I felt myself fixating on the word “human.” I am a Black person, I am an African, I am Muslim, I am from the Arabic-speaking world, and mostly what this means is that in this, the English language, I am rarel…