tarfa

the pericardium as a looking-glass

Dearest Night, Come Swiftly

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k. eltinaé
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tarfa

by k. eltinaé

you are not a loan hayati
   but a gift that unfolds like
               a silk scarf staircase

i
descend
       from heaven
                    to

                          heaven                 wandering              but

                
                                         every greeting is you.

what does it mean
               to be
                   a passenger
                          if the coach has carried
                                             your belongings    to a  cliff
that crumbled

              past        sky

                    the
                            رفیقي        رفیق العمر كل       ما في عیوني ضال  
    
i’m back in
some cafe 
and people think
i’m interesting y tal
cause i'm wearing black also when i whisper عود
they think perfume or
my heart, that hollowed out instrument 
played by a family friend between sips of tea 
what i mean is
return with
the force of a sandstorm habibi.

malexi dawa bay

Photo courtesy of Cairo Kid
Author

k. eltinaé

k. eltinaé is a diaspora poet of Sudanese-Nubian and Mediterranean descent whose work is centred
around otherness, cultural/geographic displacement, generational trauma, and exile. His work has
appeared in World Literature Today, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Many Muslim Worlds
(Penguin), The African American Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. His debut
collection The Moral Judgement of Butterflies won The Beverly Prize for International Literature
2019 (BSPG Press) and the Eyelands Book Award 2022. He is the first-place poetry winner of Muftah ́s
Creative Writing Competition At Home in the World. Winner of the Memorial Reza Abdoh Poetry
Prize 2021 from Tofu Ink Press, and the co-winner of the 2019 Dignity Not Detention Prize from
Poetry International. He is a World Literature lecturer and an Oldies and Classic Afrobeat Disc jockey
residing in Granada, Spain.

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