Buried at Sea
BY SARA ELKAMEL
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
We stand like drones on the balcony, bones too quick
to draw rust. Gold wraps around your neck
and dangles from your ears. Outside
the men carry Jika’s casket and scream—
the sky a pink funeral. For a second
we wonder how blood could spill itself
over so many godforsaken clouds. Inside we stitch sorrow
doll after sorrow doll and beat them against the floor.
We make thousands like this, spray them with blood
then with water
and beg them to suffer.
What a mess, I say as we pick them up and do repairs:
suture arms and heads and stuff synthetic fiber
like scrap clouds into their backs.
We saw the box, you say, but not
the body. Not the white linen taut
around it, not the mad dust rise as it hit
the ground. We pretend it drowned and traveled
north with the Nile.
We douse the dolls in gold, load hundreds into our bags
like fruit. We talk about our mothers and
walk for days towards the sea.
You teach me to swim, teach me
so well I could have reached
the very heart of the sea.
We swim like we were born breathing water—remember
what we did in the womb. Swimming,
there is no blood, no fire, no echo of power
no echo of blood.
No dust. No box. We carry
the golden bodies like gifts
to the gods on the floor.
Sight Lines
BY SARA ELKAMEL
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Before it was a field hospital, this hospital
was a flower shop. Clusters of ghost
white filler flowers lived and languished
in every corner like stars, square
in the throes of noon. Now the field hospital
is a poem. A living language monument
to lost eyes. November 2011. Rubber bullets
tore through eye after eye
after . In some language, a wild
flower is a demon, a bastard, an evil spirit
alive in the field. Police protocol suggests aiming
for people’s legs. Ingenious the Eye Sniper
shot at our eyes. Demon weed. Evil field. Unobstructed bullet
after bullet sprouted and stole the winter sun.
Outside the hospital that once was a flower shop
an eyeless chorus cursed Qanass
El-euyun. Eye go out in search of June. Love, let me
look your grief in the eye.
Look. Eternal Spring. Golden hue. A field of blind
sunflowers, in some language: worshipping the sun.
What heliotropic grief. Before it was a poem, this poem
was a body. Outside the poem our bodies thaw in pools
around our legs. What stars, where?
Taha
BY SARA ELKAMEL
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
In the smaller hall upstairs, Noura
won’t open her eyes. They stay shut so long
they disappear. When it’s time,
her feet dig into the frayed
olive rug. Her father flies
off her tongue, and flies, and falls.
The cool wind whimpers
before it bawls—brightness breaks
like an egg on the lime walls.
Shoulder to shoulder,
women draped with mourning
shift on heels streaked with soil
as prayers rise like steam
from below.
‘O god, purify him of his sins
as a white dress is purified of filth.’
Aaameeen. I daydream
a little washing machine in every grave,
each of us tumbling and turning
in some holy detergent,
bargained for by orphaned women
in the throes of noon.
Migrant of Love
BY SARA ELKAMEL
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
If I was going to love a woman, yes I suppose I would want her to be weak and sad and see-through, want her to run toward me in the morning, and run toward me at night. I would want her body to be clean, want my son to live in it make it a country and break it, stain the soil with his blood. If I was going to love a woman I would want her to look up, lost, sing so embarrassingly soft…sing feed me feed me feed me. But one night, sleeping, I saw a woman and I had to ask the dream to slow down. I see her burning the borders, border by border, in every map in every atlas— freeing the sick cities, the wild women, the frantic godless gods. She makes the whole world stateless and keeps the enemy locked in her heart. When they interview her, she says: Honestly, I just couldn’t stand it. So I left. From their small plastic boats, everyone has to learn to translate the birds. Each day, her lover, carried far by the blind eyes of the wind, poses an unanswerable question to the sea. #63. Is there a way back to her country? Angered by this peninsular assault of language, the sea turns red. It stays forever red. Now there is one sea Red and one sea Dead. His voice breaks barking in the dead red dark. He hunts. There is nothing to gather. I don’t even know what he’s hungry for. The dream leaves silent lacunae so our bodies can burn. A wind breaks over a pink trick mountain in the Valley of the Moon and I, I know every dream is a fiction of the world but she was queen of all of it. New trees grew from her borderless palms.
