Writings
Forthcoming in The Weeping Seeds
Last of the branch, 2024
Only later did I understand.
How small you were to yourself.
Baba. One of sixteen children.
Your mother, only eleven.
Two years at her mother-in-law’s
for the bed to be prepared
with ebbing red.
Her future, a faceless flood.
Two men clung at her fluted legs,
playing the same generational fate.
Their hands
buried in like a knife,
seeking a sanctuary within the gash.
Your mother,
surrendering her pearl candies
to the village witnessing.
Forthcoming in The Weeping Seeds
Three constellations, 2024
there is a woman who is not in love with my husband. she curls up in the darkest cavern of his skin. before i do. they share a sun together. a swollen orange storm that haunts me. every morning, she looks directly at it. the woman sets the order of the day. my husband takes these commands, gargles on fire to keep himself warm. then spits at me, and i burn to prove a point. that i am capable of rebirth. it is the first day of november: her birthday. she asks for my horoscope to prove a point. that what had happened remains. pisces, like the fish. the woman twirls her tongue, lets out a confession. i am a scorpio. in the wild, i would have hurt you. the three of us look at the cabbage moon. i peel a layer, and their sun melts in my fold. i take pleasure in the ember that sits in my temperate womb. then i give it back to my husband. he douses my dream in her sallow stomach. the birth does not happen. he fumbles, tries to catch the rays. my husband feeds her sticks of light. in fact, she is biting my arm. he is still the kindest man i know. i go somewhere else when the sun sets, let myself be eaten by the ground. in the name of survival.
Published in The Crannóg
Missteps of hills and hunger, 2025
watermelon on a roof
of palm and stone
you hide from your father
who broke a broom
on your back
as you spat the seeds
barely restraining
the juice on your chin
from leaving a mark
you told me once
on the way to mekkah for hajj
the bus broke down
like knees to the earth
twenty women
prayed to the cracked skin
of the desert stars
each constellation, a map
you unspooled for no return
fathers, brothers, husbands
already arrived in mekkah
dressed in their ihram:
two pieces of white fabric without stitching
as the night air cradles
your bare foot, licks
the dune of your shoulders
your voice swells to perfume
and you confess
you stole a piece of the ihram
for your real pilgrimage
where you walked for three days
hoping to get as far as possible
from sewing back the other half
Forthcoming in The Weeping Seeds
The Lighthouse, 2024
For you: فَنَرْ, lover of moonlight, tanned water skin,
upstream current: فَرَاغْ, phantom touch, echoing hum, wholeness
of a hole—somewhere, your each and every name
drifts back to the borders of my mouth.
For you: فُتَاتْ, firstborn daughter,
your tongue stretched, torn
between sea and land.
This is how to grow a hand-me-down life:
roots coiled around your hands, blood thick
with something hurting.
For him: بابا, he carried the leather of the lineage—
you fused the primal flesh
into your skin. Whose belonging will bare the bitter rind
of your fruitless origin?
There are no records of your ancestry,
except stories about socks and glitter.
Love that: forgotten folk; فَنَاء, antique-polished heart,
brass core, molten vein. Cinnamon fingers clutching
to the kingdom of two seas; البَحْرَيْن,
no single hand accountable for this unfurling. Why not worship
the past that paid for your life? Remember
your father’s name and his father’s name
and his father’s name and his father’s name,
slung on your shoulders, shaped like hundreds
of faraway daughters.
Love that: a small closet, whatever is not there,
all the dust you keep from the sun.
All these ways to taste the dates
on the land of a million palm trees: وَريدْ,
threads woven through the jellabiya—the same chord
around your throat, twine of language
embroidered on your nutmeg skin. Here, you leave: فُؤادْ,
morning sacrifice, octopus hearts, flame of heritage.
All these words, for you to say: let me stay.
-
فَنَرْ: my childhood name; lighthouse, source of light, or a lantern
فَرَاغْ: void, emptiness
فُتَاتْ: crumbs, pieces, fragments
بابا: baba, papa, dad
فَنَاء: dying, abyss, cessation of being
البَحْرَيْن: Bahrain; the country, two seas
وَريدْ: vein
فُؤادْ: the core of a heart, sentiments of warmth
Forthcoming in The Weeping Seeds
Self-portrait of a Pomegranate Head
For my grandmother (19?? – 1997)
the year i was born
my body pledged to unearth her
and sent off to swell
to the size of a girl
wearing the first face of fatema
before two husbands
and sixteen children
now a phantom woman
rots like every mother
the flesh of a pomegranate fruit
caging ninety-nine names
for the most merciful
and an old bitterness
of something burnt but lingers
like old sweat
i break open and a prayer falls out
untouched silk grains
my crown, a misbah
so i pass my tongue across each bead
taste the skin i have borrowed
from a dead woman ماما عوده
and ask her:
did i steal your sleep with my rebellion?