the people i come from do not linger in the sky. after all, where would they go as the rain comes down, leaving everything hollowed and open? all at once, i have the desire to begin making wekka in my american grandmother’s gas oven, granulize the dried okra in my grandfather's american coffee grinder. there … Continue reading poetry// the day after my great grandmother’s funeral
Poetry
poetry// funeral after funeral After Funeral
To believe Allah is enough for you and to actualize it are very different things... I know one and sometimes cannot even conceive of the other. I know that people are people, but people can sometimes seem like mountains. Move! Move! Move! (But they only speak sedentarism) perhaps, to believe that wholeness can be felt … Continue reading poetry// funeral after funeral After Funeral
poetry// distance(d)
I want things I do not deserve. how awful to be choked by your own idle and uncertain hands? Maybe that is the punishment: longing with no reciprocity. it is impossible to know the dead the way I need to-- so take me to Medina! I just want to taste it for a moment, (what … Continue reading poetry// distance(d)
poetry// origin stories
Before everything else, I am water. (I think) The Thames was nice and so was the Schuylkill, The Potomac too, I think. I remember the Nile. The Great Lakes. The Chesapeake Bay Like when my uncle joined our field trip and sat in a boat full of small Muslim children and they had never been … Continue reading poetry// origin stories
poetry// to know mortality in theory but to be in a body designed to reject it in actuality and why that always leads me back to God which I suppose *is* the entire point.
i wait for God here between the night and the rest of all things i know. i teach myself not to ever say my own name without folding in God does not arrive because that’s just not how it works. and i learned that. but still i struggle to teach my bones submission without fracturing. … Continue reading poetry// to know mortality in theory but to be in a body designed to reject it in actuality and why that always leads me back to God which I suppose *is* the entire point.
poetry// anxious mourning at the bank of my own river
don't you see me? thin fleshed and flickering bones i could have sworn i remembered you placing the bulb in the cartilage pressing wire circuits in my veins / can’t you see me now after you placed me here all funny looking and cracked like an old window? the rest of them have opacity stretched over their frames they … Continue reading poetry// anxious mourning at the bank of my own river
poetry// affirmations
I am not a whole lot of things but I am parts of so many. I take what’s in my way and sew it to my chest: A sky a scent the pulsing of a river, all collected and fumbled by my own clumsy digits. A loop, a song, a dance I have done too many … Continue reading poetry// affirmations
poetry// splintered rhythms
in the midst of it all there is a bird that has died and a tree mourns the loss of another fateful tenant a hundred year history etched into her lonely branches some say if you read the rings of a tree you can moonwalk through time with your fingertips how it whirls around the … Continue reading poetry// splintered rhythms
poetry// thread count
my father unpacks his suitcase that is still shedding sudanese dust around the handles and hands me a hijab that my cousin’s tender fingers picked herself from a thousand ways to say i love you to a face you haven’t seen in a sorrowful decade/ the scent of bakhour hovers in the threads/ rests in the … Continue reading poetry// thread count
poetry// confessions
few understand the burden of being introduced as your Father’s Daughter. All of a sudden your words are not your own but the both of yours the way you hold your head the way you dress the way you form syllables and sit down to eat and greet the old woman at the door are … Continue reading poetry// confessions
