everyday choosing not to tell the coworker she was in your dream;
picking up almond milk & cosmic brownies from the drug store;
organizing the silverware into their silent rows; renewing the labels
on the spice rack; drying the clean sheets, folding corner to corner
to corner; coaxing the cat into her carrier for the vet; everyday
choosing not to tell the coworker about your dreams at all;
unraveling fractions on the worksheet; picking up coffee
filters & AA batteries from the drug store; throwing out the old
rice in the fridge; rinsing grains from the tupperware; everyday
choosing not to chat with the coworker about anything besides
weather; setting the oven timer; pushing the garbage bins
to the lip of the sidewalk right as that truck pulls up, the men
ready to flip and reset them like dominos along the long road.
Ghinwa Jawhari is the author of BINT (2021), winner of Radix Media's Own Voices Chapbook Prize. Her essays, poetry, and fiction appear in Catapult,Mizna, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, The Margins, SPEAK, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman (2023) and the Asian American Writers' Workshop (2021). Based in Brooklyn, she is the founding editor of Koukash Review.
