Clowns in the Olive Trees

There’s a sort of anger
from my father
in line deciphering what
a McNugget could be.
It may not be pork, but
it still sounds haram.
A maybe once true
theory says, “No two nations
With a McDonald’s have gone to war.”
The clown nations never cared much
for my father’s life. He learned
the colonizer language of English,
but not that of capitalism.
He demands to know why
white embedded over brown
lettering on the menu isn’t just
saying what the food is.
Being born
in the motherland of the clowns,
I am assumed to know, after
all this is for me.
Didn’t I want to be
here? Speaking foreignly
with Anglo tongues for food?
What does the “Mc-” prefix mean
to burgers anyway?
I have my order assigned
to me through commercials
like a social security number
or a passport for being born
into consumerist traditions,
and it comes with a toy.
But what about my father,
a man abstaining
from red meat due
to a troubled heart


He asks a blonde register jockey
how anyone is supposed to know
what to do here.
While Baba’s words only have
the faintest mementos of home
in p’s being vaguely voiced as b’s,
the blonde cannot conceptualize
the question. “It’s McDonalds?”
She retorts a perceived universal
truth of instinctive knowledge
with no known time of being learned.
An Arab from holy olive tree lands denied the right of return,
Baba was stuck in a state
of perpetual alone
among propagandized people
who do not know their taxes
paid for policies and pogroms
that exiled him to their unwelcoming midst 
for the sake of ethnic spring cleaning. Then these people have the audacity
to treat him like he is ignorant.
Finally, Baba finds words that work.
Simple signifiers of the signified.
He orders “A fish filet.”
The blonde reads back
“A Filet-O-Fish” as a lesson
in assimilation
to the supremacy of the clown.