Golden Shovel after Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning" In the last third, there is no one to speak to but You,and still, my mouth is unable to perform what I was createdto do. Prayer, an oasis in the midst of the nighttime desert / If only I was brave enough to resist sleep, … Continue reading poetry// tahajjud (taking measurements)
Poetry
poetry// like i told you, this world is a bayou
Everywhere I go, my palms are never large enough: the anamnesis of my sorrow tumbles into the wetness. Soaked through is everything in me I had hoped to re-read one day. Soggy pages disintegrate beneath the murkiness; me, covered in mud, my mouth, stuffed with grief. Each new place brings its own funerals, its own … Continue reading poetry// like i told you, this world is a bayou
prose// life cycle part i: deliquescing
The grief has been slow mounting, percolating, seltzer-like and cool, then hot all at once. I never really knew to give it a name before, but it is teaching me. Yesterday, the sky cracked open and I saw the edge of things. It happens. Happens not often but it does. A moment arrives and my … Continue reading prose// life cycle part i: deliquescing
poetry// the day after my great grandmother’s funeral
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
prose// for Mama Nafisah
the people i love are dying. my great-grandmother, a great-aunt, my father's eldest sister has too been tucked underneath the earth. i clench my jaw laying in my bed. it is all i can do to save myself from jumping out of my blankets and running to the airport to leap on the first flight to Khartoum that i can book. i wouldn't even know where to go looking for the right graveyards, for where to lay down on the earth and press my heart as close as I can to where theirs used to pulse. i want to be loved by the people in my family who knew Allah.
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
prose// ramadan, ya ramadan (please, be gentle, I am fragile)
Last year was the best Ramadan of my life. I am afraid of what is supposed to take place on Thursday, the birth of a month as old and as familiar to me as my own family. I keep thinking, was that the peak? Will I never experience a Ramadan like that again? When I … Continue reading prose// ramadan, ya ramadan (please, be gentle, I am fragile)
poetry// (bearing witness)
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// 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.
Daughter of Diaspora 