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
prose// on swelling and other things
I am in this funny phase of life where time moves quickly and so do I with it. The amount of growth that takes place in even a week astounds me sometimes. I don't know if I were to meet the woman I was even six months ago if she would be able to recognize … Continue reading prose// on swelling and other things
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
prose// the night of ancestral longing
On this night, 1400 years ago, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was taken from Makkah to Jerusalem in one night. Space shrank in an unprecedented way. Distance dissolved, the barriers between life and death grew blurry and soft. Prophets who had long been dead rise to pray, Adam and Abraham and Jesus and … Continue reading prose// the night of ancestral longing
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
prose// on mediocrity and ordinariness and letting myself down
Often, when I force myself, while biting my teeth and clenching my joints, to peer inside me, I all I can see is a deep, dark tunnel stacked neck high in old failures, missed opportunities, a recorded snapshots of moments when I just couldn't jump high enough, or didn't, or forgot to try at all … Continue reading prose// on mediocrity and ordinariness and letting myself down
poetry// the light
after Caroline Rothstein & in honor of the victims of the March 2019 terror attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand The Thing about life is that it is tiny small and petite can be folded up neatly and tucked six feet under The Thing about life is death is quietude amidst noise is departure from world to … Continue reading poetry// the light
poetry// fragility
i break my self in half like a ripe loaf of bread / the crack of my spine like the peppery taste of crumbs in the air as shattered crust exposes soft yeasty insides. / i split in two like a lentil in a black pot / on an old woman’s stove / like a … Continue reading poetry// fragility
poetry// thickener
I am not my father He is immigrant & I have never been one. He is tall & I am me and so I am not my father. I am loud & his voice is strong enough to be soft and not collapse. He is a healer & I write poetry He is orphaned & … Continue reading poetry// thickener
prose// the length of love
I think about the ways I want to gather up the sounds of my family, pile on as much as my hands and hard drives can carry when we expend ourselves to the very maximum. What lengths for lineage I would leap in a heartbeat! Memorize the laughter, the inflections, the accents, the words they speak in a dialect that is crisp and yet silky in my ear. There are few things as beautiful to my ears as Sudanese Arabic, shuffling its way across the tongues of women who smell like heaven. Everything flows effortlessly from my father's people and the place they proudly represent: the drape of the toub, the bright and blooming karkade that tinkers in glasses, the cold water of the Nile, the long tresses of a laughing girl who flounce her way past me in the masjid foyer.
