I Asked Him What He Needed

The morning that I read Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested, I wrote a short meditation on a postcard. I had written postcard poems before, drawn to the brevity and the link between the poem and the image. I asked him what he needed for the journey. I dropped the card in the mail to a friend. But the stories kept coming. My morning meditations, contained by the small message space of the postcard, began to take into their ambit not just the deportation regime but the administration’s broader attacks on history, truth, law, democratic norms—and in the face of such fears, my own mortality. What kind of disaster did I think was coming?

I asked him what he needed

for the journey. He said,

Write down what you saw.

Maybe, someday, the world

will want to know.

Along with poems, the book has postcard reproductions in full color.