Tag: Moudi Sbeity

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

  1. Kai Coggin
  2. Alison Luterman
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. John Amen
  6. Susan Vespoli
  7. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  8. Tina Em
  9. Kim Addonizio
  10. Molly Fisk
  11. Joseph Fasano
  12. Terri Kirby Erickson
  13. Robbi Nester
  14. James Crews
  15. Abby E. Murray
  16. Allison Blevins
  17. Erin Murphy
  18. john compton
  19. Dana Henry Martin
  20. Alison Hurwitz
  21. Moudi Sbeity
  22. Dick Westheimer
  23. James Feichthaler
  24. Karen Paul Holmes
  25. Naomi Shihab Nye

Note: For poets who published multiple times in ONE ART, in 2025, we are linking to the most-read curated work.

Two Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

A New Mythology

I want to live in a world that trains poets instead
of soldiers, that invents words for experiences too
complex to define, the kind that fracture your bones
and bloom in a thousand petaled symphony to cup
the ache in your chest. A world that drills us on how
to march towards each other bearing wild flowers,
standing silent at the break of dawn. Want a world in
where explosion is understood as a metaphor for awe
pouncing at the edge of exhale, and war a state of
self-denial, and occupation meaning that thing which
grips your attention in ever widening circles of prayer.

I want to live in a world in where the vocabulary of
ownership is a relic we visit in museums, and a stranger
is someone you feed, and dirt the reason for devotion.
A world that targets food deserts with a rainfall of
seeds, which routes rivers to parched villages, then
brigades an army of palms to harvest light ripening
on lush vines, that invade your dreams with instructions
on how to implode ripe berries between the skin of
your teeth, how to armor yourself with bare thin leaves.
Want a world that authors a new mythology for being,
one in where the only deity worth worshiping is the
ground you stand on, and to become a hero you must
not leave on a journey, but surrender yourself a witness
to the pulse within.

*

The Space Between Us

I don’t know how to save the world.
I’ve bent my tongue in half trying.
What I do know is how to tend to the space
between us. How to feel into that one eternal
pulse that keeps us together. Lean into the one
echoing breath that threads yours into mine.
Touch on this one expression of love, to that
one primordial seed from which we sprout.
When I say I Love You, what I mean is
I Am You, is your liberation is my joy is
my peace dwelling. The question isn’t how
do we remind each other of our indelible
belonging. The soul already knows.
The question is how do we remove the
obstacles towards it. How do we rip off
the tarp preventing the seed from sprouting,
the sprout from growing, the tree from licking
the light, the light from unfurling across your
chest, bellowing up your throat, settling into
your eyes like God looking at God, like love
is between I and you, between you and
everything else.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, Moudi is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Their first poetry collection, Want A World, and their memoir, Habibi Means Beloved, are set to be published in 2026. They now call the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado home.

Four Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

All Things Bloom

You cannot crack open a heart.
No more than you can bend steel
or pry open a still pursed blossom.
No more than you can peel back
the sky or force a seed to sprout
by hammering its shell.
Some things aren’t ready to stand
exposed and naked in the light.
Some cannot bear the violence
of knowing, the insistence of change.
All you can do is shine ever-on with
indiscriminate hope in trust that
all things bloom, with determined
patience that they will.

*

Gulf of My Body

water does not
concern itself
with what name
you give its
shaped body.
Water remains
what it is,
so long traveling,
passing through
our palmed attempt
at claiming it.

*

Whale Shark

A whale shark, according to the five year old at
the climbing gym, is what happens when a whale
eats a shark. Just like that. It’s simple. Everything
is separate and when two things join they just
add to another. The shark doesn’t die in this story.
Nothing changes. The world is still safe, predictable.
The whale shark was his favorite tattoo, but now it’s
erased. My full sleeve tattoos don’t erase though,
and they’re the biggest ones he’s seen. Like really big.
Like really really big. I thought of how when sorrow
consumes joy they don’t simply add to each other,
but become poignant. And when gratitude spills
into grief together they create the conditions for
surrender. Or even how water and flour make bread,
not Water Flour. Some things get lost along the way.
But I didn’t tell him this; that a whale shark is actually
a shark, just a really big one. I wanted more to believe
in the simplicity of his world, in the authenticity of
how things join, then come apart, and in the process
nothing is changed, no one dies. We just continue to
appear and disappear into each other’s lives unaffected,
our innocence not yet capable of breaking.

*

Vote For Dancing
        Cast all your votes for dancing – Hafiz

Send me a ballot that comes with a list of
public art installments and a referendum for
city funded meditation halls, and a closely
watched race for the elected vegetable of the
year – Italian squash. A ballot with a list of
dates for a day of non action, a month, a year.
Some stretch of time we agree to inhabit with
complete silence, in solitude, in stillness.
I want to choose between the many ways to
collectively practice prayer for the next while;
kneeling in front of the same tree at dawn,
submerging our feet in the creek reciting
loving-kindness mantras; may you flow freely,
unobstructed. May you never dry. And if you
do, may you still sing. I want to vote for some
body who, on more days than not, picks up a
poem, eats it, looks inside, loudly grieves.
Somebody who will pardon immigrating
geese, appoint a composer general, sign into
law a tax credit for books purchased by local
authors, farmer’s markets, sustainable meals.
I want a ballot that asks me to vote for harvest.
For dancing. For rain. In just the way a bridge
might vote for connection, and the sun for a
new day. And your hand on my shoulder
for steady, and the sky for welcome, for air.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a first-generation Lebanese-American currently enrolled in the Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling masters program at Naropa University. Prior to attending Naropa, they co-owned and operated a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City, which served as a queer safe space. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as transpersonal practices in self-expression.

Moudi’s poems have appeared in the following anthologies; Irreplaceable by Nan Seymour and Terry Tempest Williams (Moon In The Rye Press, 2025), Love Is For All Of Us by James Crews (Storey Publishing, May 2025), The Nature Of Our Times by Luisa A. Igloria (Paloma Press, Fall 2025). Moudi’s first book, Habibi Means Beloved, a memoir on growing up queer and stuttering in Lebanon, is expected to be published in late 2026 by University of Utah Press.

How to See It by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How to See It

What they don’t report on the news is the way,
after we’ve pooled on the couch from our daylong
forward press, my lover asks me to take off my socks.
And in his sweet way, in his gentle care, places palms
full of lotion around my callused heel, rubs his fingers
firm and deep along my arched sole, up through the
valleys between my toes, a secure five-in-five clasp
wriggling away the tension. He doesn’t mind that my
big toe has a fungus half the size of a quarter under
the nail bed, or that it’s been weeks since we’ve slid
into each other all naked and limbed and sweating.
Doesn’t even ask for a foot rub in return. Instead,
he kneads the miles ached around my tendons one
pressure release at a time. Wraps me in hopeful
maybes as we discuss migrating north to Canada,
or south to Argentina. Says maybe things aren’t
as bad as the headlines read, says without saying,
that maybe there are countless unsung others also
tending to this holy work of holding the world,
that maybe the world is full of nameless devotees
tracing their humble love along the sore contours
of a walked together life, so full of such kindness
to even consider how it is we might begin to see it.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a first-generation Lebanese-American currently enrolled in the Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling masters program at Naropa University. Prior to attending Naropa, they co-owned and operated a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City, which served as a queer safe space. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as transpersonal practices in self-expression.

Moudi’s poems have appeared in the following anthologies; Irreplaceable by Nan Seymour and Terry Tempest Williams (Moon In The Rye Press, 2025), Love Is For All Of Us by James Crews (Storey Publishing, May 2025), The Nature Of Our Times by Luisa A. Igloria (Paloma Press, Fall 2025). Moudi’s first book, Habibi Means Beloved, a memoir on growing up queer and stuttering in Lebanon, is expected to be published in late 2026 by University of Utah Press.