after Terrance Hayes
Sometimes I feel like a widow
on the floor beside the body, or a crow
below a tree that's been chopped down
to revive the view—my own body
turned granite, turned black river,
mourning curdling the skin like wind were fact.
Sometimes I feel like a martyr
who lost her life trying to free a litter of kittens
born to an activist in prison. The kittens feed
on the marrow of night—the activist hides them
in her hair; between her teeth.
Sometimes I feel like a February heat-wave.
A silver shadow above a girl’s lips.
The wind by the sea, making impossible the salt.
Sometimes I feel like the mother
of five stillborns, who still live inside me.
I am a bad house.
That's why they cannot leave.
In the only dream I am not looking for a man I love
but cannot find, I am looking for myself.
I have two tongues,
turning amber like leaves.
Sometimes I feel like a prisoner, playing
his five-string cello before breakfast.
But I don't have a cello.
I have made so many things impossible.
Sometimes in my dream, I know the name
of the place I live, but not how to find it.
I move through cities as stubborn as dust,
looking for a spring as deep as a good
mother’s uterus.
The wind goes quiet when I find it.
The wind goes quiet when I find it.
Sara ElKamel
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel's poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, and Gulf Coast, among others, and in the anthologies Best New Poets ‘20 & ‘22 and Best of the Net ‘20. She was named the winner of Redivider's 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and the Tinderbox's 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. Elkamel’s debut chapbook “Field of No Justice” was published by the African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books in 2021.