Eleven days ago, two bullets crossed off two more faces from my family tree,
They were 14; they were studying.
The blood-soaked arithmetic pages are sitting on the mantel; my uncle won’t throw them away.
I can’t tell you what death looks like, but when he came, he stayed.
We held one funeral for two brothers,
the misshapen grooves of a once body bend the light so, their caskets were closed,
coffins made heavy by the weight of two bullets.
My brother is thirteen and he’s learning to carry our dead. His legs buckle under the weight of his pedigree.
My father says, Stand up straight
You think this is hard?
Try carrying the living
We never hire gravediggers anymore.
Now the soil is so familiar under my hands, I’ve gathered enough to build a body,
but I’m afraid of what I’ll make.
I’m afraid to write this bloodline into something
that I’ll love.
This pain is encoded.
Our genes come to fruition on our skin.
This isn’t burgundy it’s black.
I wake up every morning wondering
when they’ll come for me.
I want to spill every color from this form.
I want to leave a canvas sinking with the weight of my pedigree.
I want to be able to look at a sunrise and not see my entire family falling to pieces.
I wish this skin had come with instructions.
When the last breath is taken, flesh turns
And for the past 21 years,
I have seen rainbows everywhere.
Bullets
My father’s voice yanked me awake
My brother had been shot.
I had never felt fear like that:
waiting for that first breath on the other side of the line at a hospital half a world away.
The thing we had been fighting for the past 11 years had reached the capitol and burrowed itself into my next of kin.
I am 21 years old and I know more about death than about living.
My life experiences revolve around massacres and funerals. I know how to start revolutions, but I don’t know how to lose myself.
I don’t know how to give in to this thing called youth because I know how it ends.
I called my brother an idiot and he said, live free or die. He said, freedom is a question of life;
if you do not reach for it, then you are not alive.
This distinct flavor of anarchy
stinks of murder, stains
like the blood of a good patriot,
and leaves a bitter thirst in your mouth
only quenched by liberation.
That week, burning cities made me feel numb, bullets made me think of my brother,
so I closed my eyes and prayed.
I dreamt of lead, of gutted windowpanes, of Damascus, of Gaza, of Baltimore
and when I awoke,
breathing made me feel guilty—
makes me feel guilty like
I should have been there,
like I should have fought,
should have stood and faced the firing squad.
When you fight for freedom, you stomach pain like that.
This body should be lined with bullets:
one for each of my brothers and sisters who stopped a bullet for me.
This is the mark of my generation.
We are more accustomed to the weight of Molotov cocktails on our bodies than we are to the embrace of one another.
Live free or die?
Die free or live.
I want to live in a time where civil disobedience doesn’t end in death,
where children aren’t born under the full moon of revolution.
Where I haven’t lost more people than there are years in my life
I don’t want this kind of wisdom.
I’m still too young for this kind of pain.
This changes you.
Not in an earth-moving, groundbreaking kind of way but bit by bit and with incredible stillness.
It’s the little things.
Like how I cringe at the word protest
Like how I don’t trust anyone who isn’t fighting
Like how I’m as comfortable with sleeping bodies as I am with dead ones because it’s all the same.
My brother hears me frowning through the phone
He says smile; you’ll live longer.
For Muhannad, Taha, and Adam
I walk into the morgue
The mortician presents my country splayed across a table
Asks me to identify the body
I do not recognize it
Its emaciated form dimmed by a death I did not prepare for
I did not expect losing my culture to feel like this
This cadaver I dared to call an identity
Once held a belief that I could hold home
On the tip of my tongue,
In the breadth of my appetite
In the weight of my memories
I only recognize my country in photographs, in tour books
Not in living color
Not in this state of surrender
My stomach failed me first gripping down on processed food
The bite of bile on my disobedient tongue
My ears followed, forgetting the timbre of my grandfather’s voice;
the swift hush of wind on desert sand
Then my accent, as they force-fed me this borrowed language
There’s something about the taste of assimilation that makes you want to get back on the boat
I think of home every time the bank asks me if I want to go paperless
Don’t they know that people of color have been doing that since Plymouth Rock, since Underground Railroad, since my uncles, turning my house into a refugee camp?
Red white blue, like stand your ground, like shoot to kill, like hate crimes
Only stars I see are when the cops roll in to take my neighborhood, my family, undocumented
Only stripes I see chain us to the prisons of this existence
I find myself talking to people across borders
more each day
I find myself crying for their countries too
This massacre
This wilted flower field of discarded nations less melting pot, more guillotine more disemboweled American dream
If you hate it so much, then why are you here?
Because sometimes, the city collapses, and the rubble keeps bleeding
Sometimes, your blood is the only thing you can carry
with you,
Sometimes, the water is more inviting than where you stand
That’s how you end up with little kids washed up on foreign soil
And I’m not just talking about the ones who make it
Do you know what it’s like to escape genocide only to be gunned down in your own home?
Don’t they know that they’re just finishing the work our dictator started?
Ever since they gave me the death certificate, no the certificate of naturalization
I’ve been seeing ghosts, mostly in the mirror, at the dinner table, at the family picnic
Trying to preserve culture, naive enough to believe that we can hold home and here without anyone having to leave
I met the president
Sat with him at a table too small to hold everything that brought us there
His hands resting
Where are your chains? They told me your hands were tied
When they sen
t those kids back, when they wouldn’t take the refugees, when they closed off the borders but not Guantanamo
Mr. President, why do they call it the land of the free when even the dead can’t leave?
Mr. President, what does one caged bird say to another?
But I could barely hear him over the corpse lying between us
He looked at me as if he thought I was afraid
Doesn’t he know, that back home, the women take care
of the bodies?
He Left Poetry in the Spaces between My Teeth
I open my eyes to darkness so profound
it speaks, but only in parable.
My arms weigh heavy on a mattress
so cold, I feel I am not here. My window
creaks, exchanging pleasantries with the wind,
or maybe fighting. God was here. The sun set
in my head and I broke my fast with the Creator.
My fear of all the outside things
like war, and love, and anger—
seven-stage meal, artisan buffet of grief—
lay out on the table. God is a hearty eater.
His appetite carried mine
then carried me. And we ate. We are still eating. Every day I am here we feast and he lets me hear his poetry.
He says,
Time is an expert chef, and your hunger,
I gave that to you so eat, child.
You were never meant to be wasteful.
With every difficulty, there is ease, and this ritual is mine.
Mama
I was walking down the street when a man stopped me
and said,
Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland?
Because my skin is a shade too deep not to have come from foreign soil
Because this garment on my head screams Africa
Because my body is a beacon calling everybody to come flock to the motherland
I said, I’m Sudanese, why?
He says, ’cause you got a little bit of flavor in you,
I’m just admiring what your mama gave you
Let me tell you something about my mama
She can reduce a man to tattered flesh
without so much as blinking
Her words fester beneath your skin and the whole time,
You won’t be able to stop cradling her eyes.
My mama is a woman, flawless and formidable in the same step.
Woman walks into a war zone and has warriors
cowering at her feet
My mama carries all of us in her body,
on her face, in her blood
And blood is no good once you let it loose
So she always holds us close.
When I was 7, my mama cradled bullets in the billows
of her robes.
That same night, she taught me how to get gunpowder out of cotton with a bar of soap.
Years later when the soldiers held her at gunpoint
and asked her who she was
She said, I am a daughter of Adam, I am a woman, who the hell are you?
The last time we went home, we watched our village burn,
Soldiers pouring blood from civilian skulls
As if they too could turn water into wine.
They stole the ground beneath our feet.
The woman who raised me
turned and said, don’t be scared
I’m your mother, I’m here, I won’t let them through.
My mama gave me conviction.
Women like her
Inherit tired eyes,
Bruised wrists and titanium-plated spines.
The daughters of widows wearing the wings of amputees
Carry countries between their shoulder blades.
I’m not saying dating is a first-world problem, but these trifling motherfuckers seem to be.
The kind who’ll quote Rumi, but not know what he sacrificed for war.
Who’ll fawn over Lupita, but turn their racial filters on.
Who’ll take their politics with a latte when I take mine with tear gas.
Every guy I meet wants to be my introduction to the dark side,
Wants me to open up this obsidian skin and let them read every tearful page,
Because what survivor hasn’t had her struggle made spectacle?
Don’t talk about the motherland unless you know
that being from Africa means waking up an afterthought
in this country.
Don’t talk about my flavor unless you know
that my flavor is insurrection, it is rebellion, resistance
My flavor is mutiny
It is burden, it is grit, and it is compromise
And you don’t know compromise until you’ve rebuilt your home for the third time
Without bricks, without mortar, without any other option
I turned to the man and said,
My mother and I can’t walk the streets alone
back home anymore.
Back home, there are no streets to walk anymore.
My Sudan
My parents named me “Emtithal”
Image of perfection, God’s will come to fruition
The first gift my parents gave me was a promise,
an age-old epic of home of home,
of warriors past and new—
the craftsmen, the artists, the teachers, the doctors,
the mostly doctors—
the place where queens and beggars eat
at the same dinner table and call it family.
This is history we grew up on, a heat-packed journey
through the Sahara and into the forest.
My Sudan is green, and red, and an azure
like a sky so blue your mouth would water
when the clouds passed by.
It is silver, like the coins my grandpa tied in his belt
And bronze, like the brick-maker’s hands.
The Sudan I knew sings loud and laughs even louder.
Its face is warm, a smile, like the strangers who fought for you
before you were born.
She carries a walking stick and a baby’s bottle,
an ice pick for the popsicles in the market and
a woven basket for the summer’s grain.
My Sudan is quick, quicker than the birds that
steal the guava fruit, and lean,
leaner than the date palm tree—
toolik tool al ban wa aglik agl al daan—
my Sudan has jokes, like my father likes to say:
you are as tall as a palm tree and as dumb as a goat
because he knows he made me smart,
and we make them smart:
we make the people who brave the water when the tide is high
who conjure medicine when the hour is nigh
the people who build clocks, even though we’re always late
my Sudan has hope like the parents who rebuild
without a promise of tomorrow
or the kids who bring an umbrella even if it hasn’t rained
in decades
My Sudan is beautiful, and when my homeland cries
everyone listens, no, everyone weeps
because we are one body, one land in two countries,
one love in the hearts of many, one family
in the homes of many
We’re the generation with a world-class team of engineers, lawyers, lab techs, and chefs, teachers and entrepreneurs,
to call mom and dad, aunty and uncle
In my sanctuary I think of home, of the faces that watched us grow. This is our legacy,
memories of sesame candy
And mouthy neighbors, and weddings so loud
they’d call the cops on us every time
and summers full attending graduations
with enough degrees to pave any wall
enough outfits to call the lunch table the silk road
these days our warriors have turned to worriers,
our castles into sidewalk heavens, but we’re still
that place, that fresh fruit taste,
that promise.
I’m proud to be part of that promise kept.
Eulogy
Black girl writes eulogy in the flesh.
They took my skin;
Paraded it around the town square;
pinned their desire, their hatred to it;
Hung it on their clotheslines;
Fastened it over the eyes of their children
so they wouldn’t see me.
Blanket. Burial shroud. Body.
My mother gave birth to me in a casket.
I never grew out of it.
I had a dream last night: they strung me up
like a psalm, but this time,
The noose said,
The poplar tree leapt from her place
and carried me to my mother.
Spoiled fruit to an unknowing owner.
She couldn’t see me. They had taken her eyes,
Her mouth, her feet.
Run. Run, run, run, run, run.
I’ve been stuck here for so long
and no one came.
300 of my sisters disappeared
and no one came.
Black girl dies no one knows.
Black girl funeral is an empty house.
The spectacle of my body is an empty threat.
Black girl don’t make headlines,
Build no search parties.
They dragged my body out of the river
but it was the wrong girl.
index
Afternoon Naps in the House of God
Attention: Schools and Businesses
August
Bird-Watching on Lesvos Island
Boy in the Sand
Bullets
Choir of Kings
Cinderblock
Classrooms
Dad
Deliverance in the Information Age
Dr. Poem
Eulogy
Euphoria at Community Prayer
For Muhannad, Taha, and Adam
Sisters' Entrance Page 5