May 7, 2026

Spring in St. Paul

by Tarik Dobbs

The history of quatrains, in and beyond western poetry, is one of closure. From the heroic quatrains that march onward in ABAB fashion, to the ABBA envelope rhyme scheme of an Italian quatrain which traps one enclosure within another, to forms like jueju in Chinese or ruba’i in Persian, the essence of the form is a containable unit—whatever momentary closures we can afford to bear. One of the most memorable qualities of Tarik Dobbs’s “Spring in St. Paul” is the logical collapse of the quatrain form. At the level of syntax, most of these quatrains are open, which is to say deliberately enjambed across stanzas, resisting totalizing capture by the form. But at another level, when stripped from their context and line breaks, a lot of these quatrains could be read as self-contained ideas: “making it seem possible to live softly here where native-killing turrets were turned” or “as if the world were not daily teaching itself new verbs.” This is the dis/continuity forced onto us, as Arab citizens within US empire broadly: to be willfully clipped from our contexts and assimilated into a violent new grammar of Anglophone closure, to become the break between “about the genocide” and “or the next one.” And so, too, does this poem deftly embody the pessoptimism of this current moment, at once joining in with the resistance we’ve seen from (especially Black + SWANA + Indigenous) Twin Cities communities against which the US government has been waging war, and at the same time critiquing the omnipresence of a particular flavor of wealth and liberal comfort which ultimately cannot be disentangled from US empire’s founding militarism and genocidal violence. This is a poem of our time, yes, and also a poem in which our time is baked, genetically, into its formal makeup.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

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Not yet sunset,
the porches keep
their broad hips
turned toward evening,

—Tarik Dobbs

Spring in St. Paul

On the second Sunday
of April, I’m out walking
past the restored
Victorian homes,

their wraparound porches
unfurling their screens,
their hips turned outward,
with railings laid gently

around each.
Their eaves—even
a hand shading
a face. Bay windows

leaning out like cheeks.
These foundations
that have sat through
everything,

making it seem possible
to live softly here,
where native-killing
turrets were turned

into a university’s
ROTC building—
here, somewhere
to rest one body

against another. Still
at work tomorrow
no one will ask
about the genocide

or the next one,
where the prime minister
rode a tank
into Lebanon

and declared it
Israel. Even NPR
will say it plainly
for a moment,

then return
to its careful
furniture: conflict,
tension, response.

Each word
setting the table
after the house
has burned down.

Not yet sunset,
the porches keep
their broad hips
turned toward evening,

as if the world
were not daily
teaching itself
new verbs

for taking.
I will not
call this hope.
Only the block

continuing
in its small grammar
of shelter—gables
leaning out,

chimneys breathing. Those
in gated communities,
who’ve only known a postcard’s
Remember the Alamo,

never the mountains of
Lebanese cedar burning
under white phosphorus,
only climate change

and resistance slogans:
the ICE-out signs
staked in their lawns,
bright and self-effacing.

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