Allah Karim
I always remember you wrong because
somehow you are always warmer,
gentler to the right of me as you
sling stories over your shoulder,
laugh into your wheel, crunch
on grass in wet jeans, yellow linens,
brown leather, long lashes. They say
what goes unchanged destroys itself.
Was I asleep when you started
to evolve or did you tumble
out of the womb like this?
Either way I am fortunate
to embrace each version of you
as tightly as the next. When the seasons shift
leaves to their roots, I am reminded
there is no حَبِيب without حب
that حركة can become حقيقة.
There must be an Arabic word
to define what has happened
between us.
In you, the Nile flows twice:
first in the motherland,
second through the heart. I soften
my words into something worth saying
as gravity tugs us towards far worlds.
Grow your hair long,
let it be the rope that hauls the moon
above a new horizon. Some days
I cannot believe that Arabic
is your first language and kindness second.
Mama wants an Arab man more than she wants a good daughter
His voice, like the voice of every man
who taught me how to kneel, pierced through the night
to say he had a good time, but...
When I came to him, to be more
than my own hands could hold,
I looked like a willing daughter, standing
so close to the life they wanted for me.
What I wanted
was to be good at wanting.
What could be more holy than letting him claim a finger,
a tribe name? As the streetlights hummed
and night pressed its weight between us,
he touched my wrist, suggesting that love
was a watch running down. Or perhaps to create distance.
I looked up, his face
indistinct by twilight
that ends in absence. When I finally left him,
I swear I did so with the quiet
a mouth does letting go of a lie.
And when I returned
to my parents
I opened my palms,
empty,
not to beg
but in the way a body does
when it stops
pleading to be filled.
Artwork courtesy of our featured artist Ernest Williamson III, PhD
