For anyone who’s ever grown up,
for anyone who’s ever had to grow up;

and for Fofo and for Monteha and
for all my sisters and for my brothers,

and for my mother three times
and then my father.

People Like Us

Memories of my childhood live

between the rings of sand around my ankles

and the desert heat in my lungs.

I still believe that nothing washes

worry from tired skin better than the Nile

and my grandma’s hands.

Every day I go to school

with the weight of dead neighbors

on my shoulders.

The first time I saw bomb smoke,

it didn’t wind and billow like the heat

from our kitchen hearth.

It forced itself on the Darfur sky,

smothering the sun

with tears that it stole

from our bodies.

The worst thing about genocide

isn’t the murder, the politics, the hunger,

the government-paid soldiers

that chase you across borders

and into camps.

It’s the silence.

For three months, they closed the schools down

because people like us are an eyesore.

The first month, we took it.

The second, we waited.

The third month, we met underneath the date palm trees,

drinking up every second our teachers gave us,

turning fruit pits into fractions.

On the last day, they came with a message

Put them in their place.

We didn’t stand a chance.

Flesh was never meant to dance

with silver bullets.

So we prayed for the sun to come

and melt daggers from our backs.

Lifted our voices up to God

until the clouds were spent for weeping

and the sand beneath our toes

echoed with the song of every soul

that ever walked before us.

I hid underneath the bed that day

with four other people.

Twelve years later and I can’t help but wonder

where my cousins hid when the soldiers

torched the houses,

threw the bodies

in the wells.

If the weapons didn’t get you,

the poison would.

Sometimes, they didn’t want to use bullets

because it would cost them more than we did.

I’ve seen sixteen ways to stop a heart.

When you build nations on someone’s bones

what sense does it make to break them?

In one day, my mother choked on rifle smoke,

my father washed the blood from his face,

my uncles carried half the bodies

to the hospital,

the rest to the grave.

We watched.

For every funeral we planned

there were sixty we couldn’t.

Half the sand in the Sahara

tastes a lot like powdered bone.

When the soldiers came,

our blood on their ankles,

I remember their laces,

scarlet footprints on the floor.

I remember waking to the sound

of hushed voices in the night

etched with the kind of sorrow

that turns even the loudest dreams

to ash.

Our parents came home with broken collarbones

and the taste of fear carved

into their skin.

It was impossible to believe in anything.

Fear is the coldest thing in the desert,

and it burns you—

bows you down to half your height

and owns you.

And no one hears you,

because what could grow

in the desert

anyway?

August

Remorse is my grandmother’s pear tree,

me bent over a tin pail washing dishes

in the sun of our final moments.

The water drawn from a drying well

by a niece I did not know.

The porcelain scraping sand

against the pail, eroding

like my family.

Like the strained conversation

between my mother sitting across

from the woman she hadn’t seen

in five years—

Me, the daughter she hadn’t seen in one.

Sisters’  Entrance

Ms. Amal tried to teach us about love

in Sunday school.

She said:

God is a poet.

He opened up the sky,

spilled His word across our skin,

and called it revelation.

This aging giant, with

a soft spot for affection, made

you and me and a soul mate for every one of us

as long as we wait.

We couldn’t.

Restless hands clasped under classroom tables.

Obsidian eyes locked across prayer aisles

as we slowly opened our minds to

the gravity of one another.

Passion is a paradox in the house of God;

a weightless anchoring that draws you

closer to your Creator and

makes you fear the heart he gave you.

You confuse enchantment with doubt,

desire with insubordination,

stranger to the weight of it all.

That’s when they started separating us:

girls’ side, boys’ side

and then by age,

they introduced us to the Sisters’ Entrance.

Sesame Candy

Remember the summer we planted arugula

in the sidewalk garden

the same year the boys covered their heads in ash

the same year we didn’t know anyone new

the same year grandpa called all of us wicked?

I go back there sometimes, next to the dogwood tree

and see the place where our garden used to grow

the magnolia, the figs

I take the seeds home with me

I keep them in a desk drawer

waiting for a drier year,

or a rainy one, or a reason

I keep hoping that I’ll turn away

and look back and see those girls playing again,

the ones we used to be before the war.

Afternoon Naps in the House of God

I lay my head on cushions

so clean

they smell like piety,

back propped against a wall

so firm

it sticks out

          like doubt.

Loose Threads

Euphoria at Community Prayer

#MuslimParents

The Imam on Charity

I counted three Maseratis,

two Ferraris, and

a Lamborghini

in the parking lot.

Reach into your pockets

and

cough up some piety.