A golden shovel after Suheir Hammad
A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on
the first morning I am by myself and the
open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink
of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of
her body. To write my way out of the stories of war
I wrote the war again and again I wrote its wounds. May
arrives in a frenzy of questions. Whose children will we
lose at the border? What use is it to remember
what has never ended, to elegize how
ardently we believed? This is not who we are becomes anthem, divine
chorus, armor against the living. Our human
excesses, our florid silences, our repetitions, indelicate. Beings
so brittle any one of the next days might break us. Can
we, finally, and can we imagine what our new shapes might be?
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book of poems, Water & Salt, won the 2018 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize and Letters from the Interior, a finalist for the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Tuffaha’s honor include the Robert Lawson Literary Award, Best of the Net 2020 (nonfiction), and several Pushcart Prize nominations. Most recently, her work has been published in Jubilat, the New England Review, Porter House Review, and Southern Humanities Review.
