410 411 SUFFERING AT THE SPEED OF INVISIBILITY, THE POETRY OF OMAR KHOLEIF Tomorrow never arrives in our distant future, somehow it is always just lying-in-wait and ambushes us unawares. If poetry is poetry, then it functions like tomorrow in this way. It is not that poetry is, or should be, full of surprises; waiting to pounce on us like a cat from behind the door. Rather, it tells us things that we already know and yet are surprised by, which makes it ring true. How that truth-like-feeling lands is dierent for everyone and varies from moment to moment and in the speed by which it is encountered—like the pop song playing on the radio as you motor along the freeway at sunset that brings you to tears for reasons that you can’t entirely understand but you know all the same. The following poems by Omar Kholeif will nd you in our present moment thinking about your body in relation to someone else’s, to America, to illness, to its fragility when beset by the violence of homophobia and racism, and to its own mysterious vulnerability. These are all things we see every day liminally, subliminally, and even super-liminally. With Kholeif’s poems, it is not a matter of “slowing down to see,” it’s about being able to shift gears to nd other speeds to hear things, another pace to feel things. True, in the end, you may have to slow down to read these, but you may also have to listen faster to catch up. Perhaps, poetry won’t nd you at all. Either way, we all move at our own pace as do Kholeif’s poems. —  Omar Kholeif CF FRSA, London, UK; Sharjah, UAE; Los Angeles, USA © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.