This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elena Macdonald: To start off with, I learned from one of your interviews that you have a slam background, and I was really interested in how it impacted your second book, and also just your poetry in general.
Maya Salameh: I learned everything I know about music from slam poetry. I came up at the San Diego Poetry Slam, which was really about 20 of us who’d come to this small venue called Queen Bee’s. San Diego’s not known for having the biggest poetry scene in the world, but for a 16-year-old, the opportunity to share and learn from real human beings who get up on a stage and share things, who were being so brave in their sincerity, was very important.
Going to public school, you’re not encouraged to explore your artistic side very much. The only poetry we were taught was Shakespeare, and so I developed my own curriculum by looking random crap up on the internet, searching like, Arab poetry, Arab American poetry, like is there poetry that exists that reflects my experience? And I found a lot, and writers like Etel Adnan, Adonis, Nizar Qabbani, Safia Elhillo, Franny Choi, Maram Al-Massri, Danez Smith, Ghayath Almadhoun, and Vanessa Villareal helped me find my own voice. But obviously nothing represented my experience completely, and so I figured if I want something that sounds and looks like me, I’m gonna have to make it. And so those experiences, getting up on that stage and sharing of myself to a loving community and, above all, the somatic experience, the rhythm and music and physicality of snaps and stomps and letting the poem show up in your body.
In college, I was part of Stanford’s Spoken Word Collective, which was such a loving community, because so often being an artist is about rejection, and about toiling by yourself in your Google Doc alone, and so slam gave me a community, gave me a sense of possibility and of love, of writing in community, which mattered so much to me as a young writer. Even now, as I become more of a “page poet” or whatever, I still have that attention to rhythm and music that’s so central in slam.
The Arab tradition also has a storied history of oral poetry (zajal), and I think that is also the most accessible way that poetry reaches real working people, those who might not have a degree or who might be learning English as a second language, and being raised by an English learner, the ways I communicated my poems to my mom or to my grandparents was by reading them out loud, and so it mattered what the poem lived like off of the page, and that attention to music and rhythm is one that still informs my writing now.
EM: I love that answer, and it definitely comes through with the rhythm throughout. The sound work you use is quite lovely. I love that you mentioned having the caring audience, because I noticed a lot of care throughout the book, both caring for the self and caring for others. And in an interview with KB Brookins, you mentioned that “love is a practice of showing up whenever we can,” so I’d love to hear about the role that caring played in the book.
MS: Yeah, one of the poems in the collection is titled “Why Aren’t Y’all Driving Your Friends to the Airport??” Maybe I’m someone who’s too easily rage-baited by Twitter but there was a moment there where people were going around and complaining about things like being asked to help a friend move or drive them to the airport. This has been said before, but everybody wants to be part of a village and nobody wants to be a villager.
I am someone who’s been very blessed to have many friends, and to value and prioritize my friendships equally to my romantic and familial relationships. My family, my friends, and my lovers are, in my mind, in that same universe of love; it’s a very American thing to praise romantic love as the first and most important kind of love, and also to save the best parts of yourself for romantic love. That seems really sad to me, especially as someone whose life has literally been saved by my friends in so many material and emotional ways.
Friendship specifically is such a life-giving experience, and I think that we owe our friends everything, and it’s something that I try, to the best of my ability, to apply in practice with those I love. I think boundaries are great. I also think sometimes people develop very strict measures of not wanting to be uncomfortable or inconvenienced. Being in a deep friendship with somebody, in a lifelong relationship with somebody, means you will experience measures of annoyance and irritation and conflict, and that’s normal, and it doesn’t always have to be traumatic or abusive. It’s okay if sometimes you’re annoyed or inconvenienced. That’s just part of being a villager, you know? It’s not all just showing up to bachelorette parties. It’s also getting driven to court and dropping off soup and sitting on the phone longer than may be “efficient.”
EM: No, I think that’s great. I love that poem so much, and I also… it’s a sentiment that I stand by fully. Because why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you?
MS: Like if you love somebody, that means that you show up. Your friend you can go get drinks with is also great, but you know? Love is a verb, it’s an action, a daily habit and commitment. It’s not just something you say in passing.
EM: Another way that I saw, kind of, love showing up in your book as well, was also with the moments of girlhood. I deeply admired the scenes about going out and getting ready with the speaker’s friends, it had a lovely voice. And I was especially drawn to a moment in “For Every Siren with a Drill”: “girlhood passed with loving instructions,” and I’d love to hear more about that poem in general, and also just girlhood throughout the collection.
MS: Girlhood is so precious to me. We live in a society that deeply reviles girlhood and femininity. It was something I dealt with a lot as a kid; I was very much the “blue is my favorite color” kind of tomboy, an “I’m all natural, I don’t want to try using makeup,” kind of middle schooler. As I grew older, I asked myself, why do I affiliate femininity with weakness? Why do I immediately associate beauty rituals with oppression? And though I don’t think today’s industry is generally a positive force for women, rituals of beautification predate capitalism, and have existed for us and by us, you know? And some of the moments I have felt the most beautiful do not make for inspiring postcards, like when my favorite auntie taught me how to use a razor to shave my legs. Sometimes, yes, beauty rituals are costly and oppressive and difficult. And, beauty rituals can be fun, and lighthearted, and a bonding experience between women in a language that’s completely illegible to non-femmes, you know?
We, as women and femmes defined broadly, have this lovely syntax in common, one you can’t explain to someone who hasn’t been frantically putting on her lash clusters while her other girl is pouring her a shot. Somebody else is in the back like where the fuck is my blue eyeliner? That teeming girlhood, to me, feels like such a visceral and lush and alive feeling that I could never renounce or disclaim. It’s something I really wanted to honor in this book, especially in this era of “divine feminine” brainrot, like I’m a smart ass lady, and I like to put makeup on and decorate myself because I am worthy of that decoration. To be beautiful while also giving yourself permission to not be beautiful, and to not be tortured by when am I beautiful and when am I not? Accepting that it’s just all part of girlhood and womanhood, and that whenever it is that we feel beautiful is precious in a world that’s constantly trying to tell us we aren’t. So however it is that we get there, maybe sometimes we can allow ourselves that one good thing for that moment.
EM: I love that. I think your book also does the both-and so well in so many different aspects, too. Because we have the hyphenated identity, of an Arab-American. So, speaking about identity, too, I think that that was one of the things that also struck out to me a lot in Mermaid Theory. I’m the child of an immigrant, my mom’s from Russia, so in ways, I understand and resonate with immigrant narratives, but of course, in other ways, I do not. I specifically love when books talk about language. And there was a line in, “My Country’s Fables Say I’m Devoted,” the “serrated / syntax,” which that line drew me so in, and I’d love to hear about how the idea of language, both as a concept, but both, but also Arabic and English, how the idea of language impacted the book.
MS: My mother and I kind of learned English together. I was the oldest, and so I spent a lot of my childhood translating. Those experiences shaped my awareness of how important language was, and I talked about this in a different interview, but specifically the Arabic language and the way that it so marked us immediately after 9/11. My mom asked me to stop speaking Arabic in the grocery store because she worried for our safety. I think it’s easy for us now, in this 2026 moment, to forget (though I would argue that Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism is almost worse now than it was in that period) but that was a very specific period to grow up in, and feeling so viscerally that that language was something that marked us, right? And the fact that my mother was afraid of using it made me grow more attached to it, in a perverse way maybe, but I felt like fuck that. I’m not gonna let this go. So I started kindergarten speaking only Arabic, I went to a French immersion school, so I was learning English and French at the same time. There was a lot going on for 5-year-old Maya, and so I think well, first, I was very lucky to have that opportunity, and to be juggling 3 languages at the age of 5, and it also there’s a word for this in psychology, but, you know when certain words have a color associated or like a taste?
EM: Synesthesia?
MS: Yeah, maybe I have. Growing up in a multilingual household, yes, the word for love feels different in French than it does in Arabic. And there’s also studies about this, too, where people who think about a problem in their second language are able to think about it more clinically, or in a more detached way, and then in their native language, they think more emotionally. Neurologically, it’s very interesting, and also as a poet, it made me very awake to the differences between languages, and also the ways they interact and kiss.
Spanish and Arabic share 3,000 words. French and Spanish are cousins. So I’m really interested in the ways that syntax and pronunciation and habituation in different languages shape the way people are interacting with words, and also specifically for transitions between Arabic and English, as somebody whose Arabic is very weak now, I can really only just call myself a heritage speaker. That’s probably the most generous term. I’m not willing to let that go, and I also only wanted to translate things that felt… correct to translate, right? Like, if I was thinking about the Arab-American second-generation person who maybe doesn’t speak any Arabic. There are also, you know, members of our community that were not lucky enough to go to Arabic school. And so I was okay, well, these parts I’ll translate. And then there’s one poem, called تقبرني, which is a very specific Lebanese word that means may you bury me. It’s kind of a morbid phrase, but in Lebanon, it’s actually a very loving one, and it just means I want to die before you.
EM: I trust.
MS: You know? My grandma would always say that to me, and it was,, for me, a deep expression of intergenerational care and love, and I didn’t want to translate that word, because I also think as the internet grows, it is very easy for any kind of reader, if they encounter a word that they don’t know, you can just look it up. And so it was something that I was balancing, as I thought about – poetry’s all about self-disclosure. What parts of your experience do you want to translate? What parts of your experience do you want to make a small research assignment for somebody who’s actually a little more dedicated to understanding the whole story.
EM: Yeah, I love the ability to give people the choice of whether or not they dive in. Another thing that I was really drawn to in the book was the idea of myth, and you mentioned in an interview with The Rumpus, you said that “myths are just rumors we share in conversation with the people we love,” and I’d love to hear a little bit more about that, and also the impact of myth on Mermaid Theory. Lots of broad questions from me.
MS: No, I love that question. I love myths, I’m a big creature feature person, even growing up I was very into vampires and werewolves and especially whatever the cultural fable or backstory was behind these assorted cryptids and creatures. And Catholicism, especially Maronite Catholicism, there’s a word, maybe it’s syncretism, where whenever Catholicism comes and “visits” (violently conquers) an Indigenous cultures they transmute figures, like Tenochtitlan becomes the Guadalupe, and for us, the fertility goddess Ishtar can become our Virgin Mary. And so Catholicism is full of these myths and fables, whether it’s the story of St. Barbara getting locked up in her tower and then fleeing in disguise, or St. Anthony, the saint you pray to when you’ve lost something and want to find it. Catholicism is full of these really animistic myths, and again, most of them are semi-mangled Indigenous Arab stories as well, especially for us Maronites.
At my church, they would do, like, every Saturday, a very informal 2 hours of Arabic school from some random uncle in the parish, and then 2 hours of catechism class. Very informal, but it was useful. It’s probably the only reason I speak any Arabic now. But, in Catechism class, I was always the kid who was, like this is not….it’s not adding up, guys. And, I’d ask, well, if you can’t kill somebody, like what if they sneak in your house, and then you punch them, and then they fall, and then they die, but you’re protecting your body which is your temple, and God said you’re supposed to protect your temple. And the uncle is like can we….can we just read the book? As a child, I was constantly questioning the religious stories I was told, because….and I said this in a poem in my first book, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, but “Scripture is gossip.” The Bible is primarily composed of stories men have told each other, and that other men have ratified and decided is correct.
As a Catholic woman who grew up, you know, constantly being told different narratives about the admissibility of my body and how I should be presenting myself, both in my gender presentation, my clothing style, modesty, etc. It made me curious about who decides these stories and these myths, who passes them down, and who ratifies them. Oftentimes, the stories of women are seen as myths, and the stories of men are seen as scripture. And so the stories I was told by the women in my family, the ones that were less consecrated in our family history, those I really wanted to – not legitimize because I don’t think they need to be legitimized, but those were the stories that I wanted to center, and I wanted to put at the heart of the collection.
And so when we think about myth and we think about rumor and gossip, and how oftentimes rumor and gossip are derided as womanly, or “catty” – I thought that centering the book around fable and hearsay, and the slipperiness of a story that’s constantly being thrown around different communities, was a way to play with both my own unreliability as a narrator, as a second-generation person who could never really capture the cities I spent all this time in, and also as a woman who has had her credibility questioned. Centering myth was my way to kind effeminize the story and to center the stories of women over the ones we’re usually sold.
I’m more interested in the story that’s under the floorboards of the big story that we get. Especially the myth of Atargatis, I spent a lot of time reading different origin stories, and there’s a whole bunch. And so, in that longer poem, I figured I would include all of those different origin stories, because I’m sure there’s an element of truth in each one, you know? And each version is interesting, and each permutation of the story also adds another layer of mystery and oily slipperiness to it.
EM: I think that’s such a lovely way to put it. In thinking about that, what else do you think contributed to the book? Literally, film, music, etc. I know you have a playlist, which I’m excited to explore, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about how the arts impacted your work.
MS: My work does not exist without the amazing work of the other poets that I’m obsessed with. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my mentor, Safia Elhillo, who helped me so much in developing my first book, and who has just been such an influential writer in my life. Also I adore Hala Alyan’s writing poems, but also The Arsonist’s City is my favorite novel in the entire world, I just think it’s beautiful. Etel Adnan is also a big figure throughout the book. She’s someone whose legacy I am very honored to be in line with.
In terms of films, I think I mention this one at the end of the book, but there’s this movie called Atlantics. It is a gorgeous movie. It’s set in Senegal. It’s about a man who leaves his town to seek work in Europe and who ends up drowning in the passage there. And the entirety of the film is actually centered around the woman he leaves behind, and how she sees him, he starts appearing to her as an apparition, and ghostliness and creaturehood is a big feature of how I think about Mermaid Theory.
A big part of this book is also thinking about the creaturehood of the Arab woman, and about how one asserts claims to femininity, to delicacy and beauty and joy in an environment where Arab women and Arab people in general are in an environment of extermination. We are watching Arab bodies pile up on our screen every day. And so when we think of course, with gratitude to Mbembe’s necropolitics, and to Jasbir Puar’s work on debility and the right to maim, how do we theorize joy or even venture to be presumptuous enough to think that we, as Arabs in the imperial core, deserve to have happiness when we are surviving in this climate of extermination and genocide?
So a lot of my work is also inspired by the many brilliant Palestinians writing today, who guide me as I try to move forward with integrity and purpose in my own poetry career. I just finished Heaven Looks Like Us, the anthology by my dear friends Noor Hindi and George Abraham. It is knotted and perfect. Work like that really speaks to our moment and doesn’t flinch from it. Thinking and writing like that was important to me as someone who was trying to carry both extreme grief and trauma and also a possibility of happiness, and dancing, and beauty, and things we often see as really extraneous, but the revolution will hopefully include some element of dancing, and of joy, and of arguing with your sisters, and teaching each other how to wax your eyebrows.
EM: My next question is gonna be about gender because I loved the way you spoke about gender in the book, there’s lots of mentions of “not a girl,” or bordering on girlhood, which I know I mentioned girlhood earlier, but I was curious about, specifically, how gender plays, because we get the lovely matrilineal relationships, but we also get these moments of straying away from girlhood, but then bouncing back into it, and what does it mean to be a girl? What does it mean to be a girl of color, etc. So I’d love to hear about how gender influenced the book.
MS: I love this question. As much as I love girlhood, I’ve also had moments where I think girlhood is a prison, and I want to throw it all away. I am somebody who sees my gender as pretty fluid. I present now as pretty feminine, but when I grew up with really short hair, most people just misrecognized me as a boy until I was about 14. Having that slower entry into girlhood was liberating in a way, or having a pretty long stretch of years where people didn’t always calculate me as feminine, I’m sure for racial reasons, class reasons, whatever it was, but, as a kid, it was not really something that I thought about that much beyond, I saw girlhood as a set of rules, like being girl means you can’t do this, or you can’t dress like that.
I kind of saw masculinity as more free than girlhood, and I think it’s something I still carry with me now, even as now I feel very comfortable in my femininity. In some respects, yeah, I think gender is fluid, I think my gender is fluid, and I also think I will always be an Arab woman. I think I wrote this somewhere, but my gender is the way that numbers kiss letters to make Arabic. I think all womanhood is drag to some extent, but the Arab womanhood I was taught, that I grew up watching on television, we have Haifa Wehbe, she’s the most fabulous Lebanese woman (which, just so you know, is a very competitive title), like just, the cuntiest attitude, the most makeup, the most maximalism and drama, and so that aspect of Arab femininity, especially now in this era where we see white women getting fillers to look more racially ambiguous, to look more Middle Eastern.
I think I’ll never be able to extricate my gender from my culture, and also that can be a good thing, and I feel the most womanly when I’m wearing eyeliner and my arms are full of bangles, and maybe it’s not like that for other women, but for some Arab women, that’s the script that I’ve learned, and for now it’s the script that I enjoy, and I’ll keep playing with it until it isn’t fun anymore. And so I try to honor both of those sides. And again it’s that both-and, right? Maybe I’m just greedy, but… yeah.
EM: Not necessarily greedy, I think it’s just more expansive, you know? I think that having the possibility to do, again, the both-and really is important. My therapist always says two things can exist at once. And I think that more people need to be considering that.
MS: I agree. I’m also just, like only a girl, guys? Kinda boring. Sometimes you wake up, you know, just depends how you feel waking up. Yeah.
EM: Each day is different, and I think that’s a beautiful thing.
MS: You know, I agree.
EM: My second-to-last question is about the experimental poems. A couple in particular really drew me in. I loved the use of white space. I loved the use of the different boxes, particularly. I also loved the footnote, the Mermaid Theory poem, where there’s so much as in the footnotes. I would love to hear about “Seismograph” & “Mermaid Theory,” And I’m kind of curious about how you figure out which poems are best meant for experimental forms.
MS: Hmm. I will say I’ve always been somebody who has resented the rules I was taught about poetry. And when you’re in high school, and they just teach you, you know, Shakespeare, and I’m like….I don’t really want to focus on iambic shit, I just want to write what I feel. So eventually I found myself increasingly drawn to boxes, and to citation, specifically, and it kind of recurs throughout the Mermaid Theory. I think this comes from – in a past life, I was a psych major. I was in a clinical psychology PhD program that I ended up dropping out of because….whatever. I didn’t like it, and I’m in law school now. I think an Arab-American lawyer will be of more use to the movement I seek to be part of.
But the point is I spent most of my education thinking about psychological evaluation, and about the ways that science has tried and failed to catalog and apprehend the Arab subject’s thoughts and feelings. What I was most interested in was culturally competent therapy for Americans, and how a lot of psychology is based on studies of white American college kids, and so most psychological findings are not the most applicable for the people that I grew up around.
You know, we’ve read the articles that say there is no post-traumatic stress for Palestinian populations because there is no post. We’ve read the studies that say that Arab Americans actually express their distress in more somatic ways, rather than in more verbal forms. And so the more I thought about the ways that science tried to apprehend, categorize, and box my community in a way that really didn’t fit it, and the more research I did around the topic, it made me think again about science as also a flawed post-colonial form.
Then as I started law school, every sentence you write, you have to cite and back up. So now I’m starting to think about the burden of proof, how every word you utter in a courtroom better have an exhibit behind it. As an Arab woman, I grew up feeling that the feeling that I felt, which was one of constant surveillance and anxiety, and the insurmountable feeling that we kept dying, that I was being dramatic, that I was being extreme, or that I was too angry. And that part of my interest in psychology was out of a desire to prove like, I’m not crazy, here’s the citation. And sometimes in the poems, this also reflects, right? Where I’m like, this is how I feel. Here’s also the article that actually shows that is correct. And, you know, maybe it’s sad I feel that I have to prove myself, but another perverse part of me does enjoy proving that I am correct.
With “Seismograph” specifically, that was colored by the fact that California is just a state that’s always shaking or on fire, and so this poem came together after there was a minor earthquake 2 or 3 years ago, and my partner at the time woke up, and I didn’t even notice it had happened. I just thought it was funny I’d become so accustomed to it. But I thought to myself, wow, how fucking Californian that I’m utterly unfazed by the constant natural disasters in this state. And so it made me think about seismographs, I ended up looking up the Richter scale.
The book also reckons with ecological collapse and the environment. It was such a lovely California Saturday, just relaxing after an earthquake, and it made me think about love. And, you know, I just really liked the way that the seismographs, they kind of map it out, and I thought I’d attempt an affective map of the day that I’d had.
For Mermaid Theory, there’s always pressure on a title poem, and I wanted to clarify what I was trying to say about theory. It’s that same interest in science and in whose story gets to be legitimized in the academic journals, in Project Muse or Nature Magazine. The clearest thing I could say is that our theory is that we refuse to forget.
Shereen Naser said “they can never take what we remember / no matter how imperfect it is.” Our women press on theory’s heels, and they press against the narrative the scientific journals want to paint. They press against the pathologization of our rage, and our anger, and our resistance. And so I think I was trying, again, here’s the alleged story, and then I tried to use the citation there to say, but here’s that story that’s under the floorboards of that other one. I keep saying floorboards, but it feels like the most apt…
EM: Makes sense to me. Lastly, what are you working on currently? What’s next?
MS: I’m like 25 pages in: I’m writing a novel in verse, and I hope it’s good.
EM: That’s so exciting.
Interview by Elena Macdonald
Elena Macdonald (they/she) is a lesbian writer from Northern Virginia. They are an editor for Aftertouch Magazine. Their work has been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Silly Goose Press. You can find more about Elena’s work at www.elenamacdonald.com.
