Christian Hawkey’s most recent books are Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Bad Words (a translation, with Uljana Wolf, of Ilse Aichinger’s short prose—Seagull Books, 2018). This poem is excerpted from a book-length poem written—a parallel writing—while translating, with Zakhir Mourane, the work of contemporary Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali. The book-length poem works with English words of clear Arabic origin to interrogate colonial and settler colonial contact zones and histories. The book-length poem works with English words of clear Arabic origin to interrogate colonial and settler colonial histories.