Our Judge, Sara ElKamel’s Comments on the Finalist:
Paul Potts — “i have”
I was blown away by this poem. The speaker had me with the confessional statement they opened with: “i have no idea what to do with my life,” and the voice persisted throughout in its impeccable and convincing blend of doubt and self-assurance. The speaker decides to occupy themselves with engaging with the notion of history—how man meddles with it or leaves it ignored—and they preoccupy themselves with the mundane: cracks in the ceiling, pigeons in sunlight. But underneath it all is a gorgeous melancholy, an elegantly expressed question over the meaning of one’s life.
i have
by Paul Potts
no idea what to do with my life. in the library there’s a marble head with half an ear missing the kind of thing you might notice if you were waiting for someone and had run out of things to read. the card beneath it says “Rome, 27 BCE,” and in pencil someone has written “Caesar” in the margin, though the printed label says “Augustus” a school group was passing by all backpacks and paper crowns and one boy asked if it was a god or just some guy. the teacher said “both,” and kept walking. later, waiting for the train, i counted the cracks in the station ceiling. it’s glass, but the kind that turns sunlight into a white blur, so you can’t tell if the pigeons perched up there are looking down or through to some other place the train was late, and for a moment the whole platform was quiet enough to hear the wings shifting above us, and someone adjusting their chair before getting up to leave.
Our Judge, Sara ElKamel’s Comments on the Finalist:
Haseeb Sultan — “the soil under our house was once the Indus”
One of my favorite aspects of this beautiful poem is the way its language manages to demonstrate how the body far exceeds its container of flesh and bones: the father’s mouth becomes a mosque “too tired to echo,” ablution peels the speaker’s body smaller, and calloused hands become gardens. The imagery in this poem is rich and cinematic, which has the effect of animating, for the reader, the inheritance of silence, faith, and pain. I find here a haunting meditation on the porous boundaries between self, devotion, and the bodies that came before us.
the soil under our house was once the Indus
by Haseeb Sultan
The spring my molars split,
father stripped an acacia branch bare,
softened it in his mouth like prayer,
then passed it to me.
Bite until the bitterness feels earned, he said.
You swallow what you’re given,
even when it cuts.
Even when all you inherit is miswak.
Father taught me silence
the way a muezzin teaches the call,
he taught me silence
the way a muezzin teaches the call,
an echo that replicates
until all you hear is absence
not return.
His mouth opened like a mosque
too tired to echo.
Since then, each ablution
has peeled me smaller.
Gabriel fluttered against the roof
of my mouth,
wings pressed shut.
Lucifer rested
on the nape of a boy
who mouthed my name
like a bruise.
Once, the imam pressed my head
into the carpet so deep
I could smell earth’s
oldest prayer.
He whispered subhanallah
into my shoulder.
I plucked a thorn
when the imam’s calloused hands
became gardens.
I kept it in my cheek all afternoon;
a splintered Ameen
I was too afraid to spit out.
It grew roots. It grew quiet.
Once, I woke to my father’s shadow
kneeling at my bed,
his teeth working a thread of floss
like he was trying to sew shut
something inside me.
That night, I helped him floss.
We did not speak.
We breathed each other
like old perfume.
He never touched me.
All my life I have mistaken God’s voice
for a man’s breath.
God watched that night
like dew drops on glass.
When the delta cuts its veins,
and roots spread like fingers
through the dark water
my fingers search a body
made of anything but faith.
The water rises in my mouth
until I can no longer pray
without drowning.
Our Judge, Sara ElKamel’s Comments on the Finalist:
Kimberly Gibson-Tran — “Imago Dei”
I was incredibly moved and devastated by the ending of this piece, as well as by my favorite lines: “I imagine the womb / of the few worlds I’ve been in. In all of them / I’m bent like a shrimp, a question mark.” I found in this poem a genuine and gorgeous exploration of identity and freedom—a kind of inner-sermon. This is a poem that changes who reads it; I feel grateful to have been changed by it.
Imago Dei
by Kimberly Gibson-Tran
A hum in the microphone. It’s been hard
to follow the pastor’s drag from Romans
to Luke to a smattering of Psalms.
I was lifting more insight from the songs:
seven words intoned about eleven times each.
He plods on. I skim the continuum
of pages, thin, gilded, overlaying each other.
He seems to want to split the words
with a thumb, like I did as a kid, digging
to lift a law or a fortune. We’ve landed in 1st
John, the love chapter. The preacher reads
“Everyone who loves has been born of God”
and alleges there is only one way to
love, that the world is loving wrongly.
There is a difference, he says, between being
an image of God or a child of God. I imagine
the womb of the few worlds I’ve been in.
In all of them I’m bent like a shrimp, a question
mark. The little fish school in the baptistry
mouthing a singular hunger in one direction.
The birds outside bob and bow, clown around.
A pew ahead, a girl’s curl could undo me.
The band is back on stage for the altar call,
riffing and riffing on a single line until
we are sure there’s no one coming after all.
Our Judge, Sara ElKamel’s Comments on the Finalist:
Aida Bardissi — “Recipe for عيش بلدي”
A formally inventive and sensorially lush piece, Aida Bardissi’s poem articulates a people’s desires and disappointments with their land with incredible grace and depth of emotion. I was fascinated by the way she turns the intimate, deceptively mundane ritual of making bread into a meditation on nationhood and the body. This “Recipe” manages to hold both tenderness and anger: it is at once a love letter, a spell, and a banner of protest.
recipe for عيش بلدي
by Aida Bardissi
1. let the yeast bloom & froth like the seeds of nationhood.
2. all our meals are birthed by bacteria known to kill a nightingale.
3. watch the water become infected with an incipit manifesto.
4. let the mixture regurgitate its newfound consciousness.
5. life will coagulate under your hands, يا إبن بلدي
6. kneed it into submission. place it under a damp rag.
7. approach it at dawn. it will have new names for freedom: malleable & purple-fingerprinted.
8. sear it against the hot stone of memory (a scorpionic cave).
9. against the fire, the dough will expand into dreamstate.
10. rip into life by tooth and supply the sickle yourself, يا إبن بلدي
11. this seed was always yours to harvest.
12. taste all the ways we have silenced ourselves. a millennia of myths.
13. even our desirability is measured against a modest pallor: both wheat-toned & pretty.
14. the very artefact of antiquity is that which contains our freedom.
15. to serve: set it on a table & break it like an old curse, يا إبن بلدي —
عيش بلدي Egyptian bread; artefact of anteriority; synonymous with life in the Egyptian dialect.
يا إبن بلدي Son of my land, a modality of mid-century Egyptian politics; the embodiment of a myth.
To read the winning poem:
Untitled (“Oh, the way breath arranges itself when fire breaks out”)
by Rua Haidar Hassouna, tr. by Alice S. Yousef
Click here: https://rowayat.org/rowayat-2025-poetry-contest-winner/↗
