Debut Fiction: 'Beirut, I Love You' by Maria Sakr

I Love You Not (I) 

I love you not for all of your cunning ways—for your misleading façade of serenity and tolerance,

a mille-feuille of secrets, ghosts, and conflict,

a world of your own, carved out by men with AK-47’s that once played the piano, and sang along to love songs,

a broken constellation of smoke, old war dust, and music,

a cosmopolitan stun grenade of so much life, and so much vogue, and even more life.

Today in Ashrafieh 

Today in Ashrafieh, our neighbor Mrs. Karam gave her son an ultimatum: her, or his fiancé.

His own flesh and blood, or the secret queer love of his unexciting life.

Her: a living legacy from the civil war, a personified raging wound of the violent secular division of 70’s and 80’s Beirut. A girl whose womanhood came too early. An illiberal whose freedom was robbed from under the bombs. A mother.

His fiancé: a middle school math teacher, millennial, who loves passionately, differently, and unacceptably.

I Love You Not (II)

I am so good at disowning you,

I am so good at wishing you were something you are not and will never be.

I love you not with the relief I feel every time the airplane takes off,

and with the harmonious stench of trash, old sweat, and coffee grounds that I come back to.

With the nausea I get whenever I think of never breathing you in again,

with the way I love you and forgive you, in the most destructive manner.