3 Poems
Lubna Safi In my poems, she is my mother I heard her say once it must be nice to decide something you needed then take it. She, whose walls stood erect like the 99 names of God she thumbed every evening taking them between her fingers because she needed because they were hers because despite the salt-tinged recitation of names she couldn’t summon her lips to savor. My mother lost her rosary in a hotel, tucked beneath the pillowcase it carried with it her intimate braille messages. Fingers over smooth wood searching, reading, following her tongue to an eternal not-finding. I read philosophy through my mother and eat up regrets more times throughout the day than I consider normal-- She calls it hummingbird-metabolic when I eat and still manage to wither. My mother is now allergic to the sun, slathers on creams, covers her face and hands in gloves. Her tears drag across my face, and she tells me that I, too, might be sensitive to the light. But yesterday the moon was full so we crowded around it on the balcony three cameras to get that perfect assault of beauty on the eyes-- our tone-deaf senses that judge without asking for reason first. Beauty is at once our situation and our deed. Fault line She points to with her finger the edges of an uneven, shore line, she traces: the surface of a divisive split deep cuts to the earth’s being. I used to think more about change. Mine, not hers, we were fundamentally disconnected, but by what and how? We were once two shores of one body between us, a river of blood and a cord, and then I was born discolored. She sleeps and I disappear sliding, striking, unsteady between sheets of paper where, she, cannot reach me. |
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About the Author: Lubna Safi is a Syrian-American writer residing in Berkeley, California where she is a student completing her doctorate, focused on Arabic Poetry and Poetics, at the University of California, Berkeley. Both her academic and creative work emerges from the deep-seated intersections of her bilingual upbringing. Her work has also appeared in the Avalon Literary Review and is forthcoming in Jaffat El-aqlam.