I have sunken into the twin bed at my parents’ house. We are one and the same: the mattress and I, the ancient-ness of this bedroom, the loss of so many things, the having of so much and the knowing I have done nothing to deserve any of it. (i am so small, so not … Continue reading poetry// (bearing witness)
Poetry
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// 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// 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// 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
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.
poetry// holy water
Water is my healing It calls my name in all of its pronunciations My toes crawl back to the rivers & the lakes & the places I know where the earth’s veins tumble open And oxidize at human touch. Water is my song The waves / the sounds of river slapping up against concrete harbor … Continue reading poetry// holy water
