An activist pulling peace by the skin of your teeth,
talking to humanitarians and politicians—
your words a useless currency,
their lives slipping through our fingers
Faster than the earth that swallowed them.
You insisted they depended on it.
Dad, our lives depended on you
and every time I had that thought
the guilt would force the tears back through my eyes
telling me not to be selfish.
There are things so much bigger than father-daughter.
Your dad doesn’t belong to you.
I know, but Dad, why are we fighting for a country that never wanted us alive?
The other day, I walked into the kitchen
and you were washing the dishes.
Humanitarian, peacemaker, hero to our people
pouring soap on a little yellow sponge and washing away the peanut butter jelly from lunch.
Dad, you’re amazing.
I hate that I couldn’t tell you that while you were gone.
Twelve years I learned to live without touching you,
because people depended on you
I tried so hard not to do that—
stopped wiping the salt from my face
and accepted it: with so many people to carry
on your shoulders, I couldn’t expect
you to remember what it feels like to have me there.
We couldn’t have you, so I had to be you.
I learned to file taxes, talk to teachers,
take my brothers to the doctor,
cook, clean, pray just like you,
be a father’s daughter in her father’s shoes
and it was impossible.
I didn’t know you were holding us together
with both your arms.
You’ve been home for months now,
so I begged you to take me with you.
I watched from a crowd of faces that look
nothing like ours,
families not nearly as frail as our own.
You argued people over politics.
I saw you cry, heard your voice
like it was my own.
You said, I just want them to stop the killing.
Baba,
I did not know.
You needed your father more than I ever needed mine.
Yesterday, the cupboard door fell off its hinges.
You told me to bring you the monkey wrench.
It was just like holding your hand.
Millennial
I want to be owed
something
for all this virtue, this
righteousness—
satisfaction for sacrifice—
but that’s not the usual way of things
so I join a group for young Muslims.
We hear the insides of our own
thoughts
from the mouths of one another.
There is sorrow here and in that sorrow,
solace.
There is joy here and in that joy,
abandon.
Such arrogance it was
to have ever felt
that I was the only one
of anything.
No One Says How Easy It Is to Fall in Love,
or How Hard It Is to Stay There
The one you love sits across from you at breakfast,
maybe it’s your sister, or your father,
or the one who holds you closer
than any other person.
Between you is the coffee, your cell phone,
or the Atlantic Ocean
or a pillow covered in your mother’s tears,
or your self-esteem again
He says calm down you feel the truth claw its way
out of your throat
Pass the butter you say,
used to the part where everyone asks how you are
you say okay and they believe it.
Your survivor’s guilt makes you apologetic
I talk a lot, sorry
I think too fast, sorry
I count the exits in a room as quickly
as I can count the exits in a conversation,
sorry
You try to control it, but that morning,
anxiety ties your lover to the bed and says,
let’s play.
She brings all her friends: the trembling legs,
the sweaty palms, the indoor voice,
your relationship.
You’ve officially been awake for only fifteen minutes
and you’ve already imagined every scenario
of things that could go wrong
on this day.
There are still 20 minutes left until your alarm rings,
so you imagine everything that will go wrong
tomorrow.
Then it rings. When he smiles,
the war packs her things and says
I’m leaving. The walls stop closing in,
the ceiling isn’t inches from your face
and you’re back in Paris, under that starless sky.
You think about kissing him,
but the Imam walks in
dangling salvation from the tip of his prayer beads
Saying things about how God speaks softly and carries
a big stick, as if his sermons
weren’t phallic enough already.
Then your mom brings eternal damnation into
the picture.
The temperature rises and you’re not sure
if it’s hell or the way his eyes look tonight.
You feel like a lie in that red dress,
heaven and hell and adolescent hormones
are picking you apart in that order.
You kiss him anyway and for a moment,
you can breathe without a ticking time bomb
on your oxygen tank.
You recognize the irony of a Muslim
with a bomb metaphor and pray to God the CIA
can’t read your thoughts.
The city falls away around you.
The night air feels like a summer harvest.
The CIA, the Imam, and your mother convene in the corner.
The bible starts looking at you funny.
You kiss him again and think this must be how the Red Sea feels when she tastes the Atlantic on a breath of wind.
But fear clamps down on your neck
so he says it first, too soon, and too quickly—
you listen anyway.
Bite down that thing you read somewhere
about how those who love first
are the first to go.
When he looks at you, forget everything,
spend the next eternity making up
for not saying it first:
carry him—the way the Nile carries Lake Victoria,
hold him, the way a traveler
hangs on to the North Star.
Love him the way the Dead Sea loves Mount Everest,
how they envelop the peaks and troughs of this planet,
let his best days sink into your worst,
and his worst days into your best
make home of this.
Every body of water, every drop,
every rain makes you think of him
and you’re both from the desert
so you can’t help but feel you’ve spent
your entire life at his mercy.
When he leaves you, it doesn’t stop raining.
/> You’re left drenched in the desert,
something you prayed for.
You start to wonder if the continents ever call for each other on the cold nights.
Or if Venus ever reaches for Saturn,
or if the moon ever wants to come home.
I tried to forget you, sunk all your memories
in the river
but the waves keep tossing them back.
I want to believe that I’ll see you again,
but we don’t live long where I’m from.
Venus is weeping in my arms
The hardest part about watching you leave
is that you can.
Anxiety ties you to the bed,
the war unpacks her things.
Islamophobia
Representation is a conversation we are seldom
invited to.
Tower Two
A night of waiting and
they didn’t come for my mother’s throat,
my sister’s hijab
A night of waiting and they didn’t take my father’s robes
Crush him once for his faith and once more for
his skin
A night of waiting and the president said we were neighbors
And the Imam cried for the towers and our flags
hung high over our doorsteps
And our families did not fear for our lives
And 300 girls did not disappear
And no one went to war
And the teachers didn’t treat me different
And the students didn’t keep their distance
And the man on the corner did not ask me if I
were a Christian
And the refugees did not cover the shore
And hundreds of thousands did not leave their homes
And Darfur did not go unspoken
And Syria did not go unnoticed
And the Congo, Ukraine, Egypt, Somalia
And young mothers were not detained
And the beaches did not fill with lifeboats
And the oceans did not fill with bodies
And the bombs and the people and the children,
the children,
the children
And my brother was not called a nigger
And my brother was not called a sand nigger
And a college boy did not reach under my sister’s scarf to pull her hair
And no one threw a pig’s head at the mosque
coming for my head next
And no one crushed beer bottles against our walls
coming with marked bullets next
And the world did not call for our genocide
And a man did not call for our exile
And I did not change my hijab for protection
And the world did not fear the water
And no one called us progressive as in liberal
as in good as in tolerable
as in alive
And this hijab was not a death sentence
And this skin was not a death sentence
And refugees did not mean nothing
And Muslim bodies did not mean less
Not at first. The next 15 years left a sour taste in
my mouth.
we never hire
gravediggers
Choir of Kings
In the heart of Khartoum, I heard a radio tune
about a butterfly sauce;
the brand spilling into our home,
the meter chosen to make the woman sound
as fragile as the message behind the advert. She sang
the best advice my mother gave
was to use this butterfly sauce,
and I thought, my grandma’s sauce could eat
your mama’s sauce three times over
and still have room for your aunty’s too.
There’s nothing fire ever taught me
that my grandmother didn’t already know.
The way the air would bend to make space for her.
The ground a canvas beneath her feet.
Her light unstoppable, her force complete.
Her blood-orange nails would crack the smoke
to drop the cloves in—a hidden pinch of sugar
kept us guessing.
I’ve never lived in my grandma’s house
but basically everyone else has—
the widowed woman and her daughter,
the homeless man by the market
the children carried in by the drought
the tailor, the tinker, the well digger
and his camel.
When the famine came, her doors flew open
the lines of people changing
the geography of our street.
Her nest of pigeons by the pear tree,
the tamarind out back. All her things
gave of themselves so the people could eat
like kings.
She said
home is a question,
every one of us an answer.
so don’t be asking questions
when you see people in my house.
I don’t know what it means to not wear
my past like a fresh coat of paint
already cracked by the distance
there still is between us.
What makes a person?
Is it the things we lose, the way we crumble,
the way we fall as if each time is the first
and last time?
Is it the change we make, is it our foolishness,
our strength, the way we die, the way we come back
from the brink of death?
How we own everything,
but save nothing? Is it the things we pass
down from those before us?
Sometimes I wonder what
it would feel like to belong
to myself. Is it the way we break?
The way we hurt one another?
Is it our excuses, the stories we keep
and the ones we leave out? Is it other people,
the ones we keep and the ones we leave out?
Is it the steady solitude of always being
in one body no matter how much you love
another person?
Is it the love we give and the love we don’t get back?
I count my siblings every morning
to make sure they’re still there.
In the back of my mind voices carry.
My own catches up. I count again.
I don’t know what it means to not be me.
Sometimes I smile just to keep existing.
In her last days my grandmother carried
hot coals from her clay fire
away to a pit until the pot cooled,
halving the coals until the bubbles slowed
to a simmer the chunks to a smolder
the embers to ash,
as if she were replicating her entire life
in those moments.
and when she died, the birds migrated
from her pear tree to her bedside and back
the radio humming in her old room.
Her collection of strangers finding refuge in her house,
a procession of misfits.
A choir of kings.
Tarzan
It’s kind of funny that Tarzan was a white man.
To just show up somewhere and call it his.
It’s kind of funny that Disney has a movie about Africa with no black people in it.
Just a white man and Africa.
<
br /> It’s kind of funny that Jane and Tarzan got together.
Jungle fever without any of the risk.
But that was back then, right?
Disney recently proposed the
Princess of North Sudan movie
in which the first African princess is played by
a white person.
In which a thousand Sudanese queens have their crowns
usurped by a girl with skin as pale as false gold
whose father had the audacity to believe
that he could just show up somewhere and call it his.
White man plants a flag in North Africa
is lauded as an excellent father for raping the motherland.
My bloodline is older than your idiocy yet here we are.
I called Disney and asked if they ever considered making Tarzan a black man.
Turns out they did. But they only got three-fifths of the way through the movie before they fixed it.
I’ve watched them tear apart our land,
take our crowns, leave our brothers bleeding on the floor
And now for $12.99 I can see it in theaters
everywhere.
The Colors We Ascribe
Our ancestors built our bodies from soil
in the creases of their hands.
We were loyal, not to the men in our lives
but to the desert clay in our bones.
This is who we were: fire wrapped in faded skin,
children of grandmothers, mothers of kings
until the day our brethren fell.
When the last breath is taken, flesh turns.
The colors of life that leave the body are the names we ascribe to our fears; we see rainbows everywhere.
The irony of fire is that your eyes go last.
Long after you can no longer feel it sting,
you can still see it burn.
In death all our eyes are gray, they mimic the hues of smoke that dance across the sky.
There are no instructions for dealing with death.
When the militia opened fire in El Fashir, we saw gold stars fall from the sky, land on every cornerstone, until the buildings began to melt.
They poured lead from a broken chalice, silver kerosene, crimson flames.
Ivory when the sun hits bone at high noon.
Burgundy when blood dries, it chips, as if it’s trying to escape back into a body.
I can never forget how much death loves my people, the way they fall asleep at his feet.
Burgundy blankets, burgundy pillows,
but our tears are colorless.
There is no hue to shade this pain.
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