Copyright © 2022 by Safia Elhillo All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Elhillo, Safia, author.

Title: Girls that never die: poems / by Safia Elhillo.

Description: First Edition. | New York: One World, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021056603 (print) | LCCN 2021056604 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593229484 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593229491 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3605.L385 G57 2022 (print) | LCC PS3605.L385 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056603

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056604

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Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook Cover design: Arsh Raziuddin

Cover art: Khadija, framed photograph by © Hassan Hajjaj, 2010/1431, courtesy of the artist rhid_prh_6.0_140374771_c0_r0

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Final Weeks, 1990

Orpheus

Profanity

How to Say

Yasmeen

Taxonomy

Infibulation Study

Pomegranate

Pomegranate with Partial Nude

Infibulation Study

Isha, New York City

Memoir

On Eid We Slaughter Lambs & I Know Intimately The Color

A Rumor

Modern Sudanese Poetry

Girls That Never Die

Bad Girl

Self-Portrait Without Stitches

The Animal

Pastoral

The Cairo Apartments

Zamalek

Geneva

Tony Soprano’s Tender Machismo

Summer

Taxonomy

Syros

Terra Nullius

Sudan, TX

Taxonomy

Border/Softer

Ode to My Homegirls

Girls That Never Die

Elegy

1,000

Summer Triangle

Palimpsest

Harder/Border

Ode to Gossips

Girls That Never Die

For My Friends, in Reply to a Question

Red Note with a Line by Ol’ Dirty Bastard

Girls That Never Die

Notes

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

“I’m hanging out / partying with girls / that never die.”

—Ol’ Dirty Bastard

“ the one with violets in her lap

  ] mostly

  ] goes astray”

—Sappho, translated by Anne Carson

FINAL WEEKS, 1990

Hours before, the night outside is black as my grandmother’s hair, its newborn moon in Sagittarius, & in the Maryland house my mother is twenty-three behind a winning hand of cards as the water darkens the length of her skirt. December now

& friends still call her

, the bride, eleven months married

& the shock of it not yet settled behind her eyes.

∴

Morning & the baby has not come. Milky winter sun in Sagittarius. I should mention there was a husband, twenty-seven

—

I can hardly imagine it, a boy that age, my father.

I cannot picture him in the room, though his work for years to come will absorb him into countries that smell of blood. Maybe he is in the room now, not yet a specter. I sketch him in but do not know where to put him—maybe in the corner, back rigid against the white wall. I cannot imagine them ever touching. I smudge him out, correct the still-wet scene. He is outside, long-limbed in a hard plastic chair. My mother called him Jack & this is my only proof they were in love.

∴

My mother is almost my mother now, darker color of the noontime sun.

∴

In the waiting room I should also place my grandparents, elegant in that old overformal way of immigrants, my grandfather’s shirt never without a collar, lush neatness of the afro against his head. My grandmother could pass for a film star, hair black & feathered down her back, any suggestion of curl or coil since burnt away & set every morning in hot rollers. Her eyebrows tattooed as they have been all my life, blue-black parentheses.

Both of them older than the independent state of the Sudan, my grandmother thirteen years its senior,

my grandfather a January child of unknown birthday though the colonial offices record it as twenty-six years before his country is born. They are placid companions, their courtship cooled amicably into a sort of siblinghood,

& I have never seen them touch so I cannot imagine it now.

He paces the cool length of the hallway.

∴

One hour & thirty-nine minutes past noon, that final diluvian push & I am outside, full head of wet hair, pomegranate creature cawing that little animal sound. Pronounced a girl

& named for a dead great-aunt, the birth certificate dated

& signed in ink. Back home I would have been known by my first two names, mine & my father’s: Safia Yagoub.

The surname rarely used, but in the new country the paper demands a patronym. Anglicized, the becomes a looser el.

Hilu, meaning sweet, strange unserious allonym of that first great-grandfather. & crowded together on a single line, marked FIRST NAME, our names, mine & his. Safia Yagoub.

Little echo of that forgotten epithet, that once-loved man, of Jack. & though I am not named for my mother, we match: Safaa, noun form of my adjective. Our shared first syllable.

Closest I have ever seen them, him & her, almost touching.

ORPHEUS

Mold blooms on the yogurt, furring the edges

in ancient colors. My body is something I have worn for other people. Even five years ago

I would not recognize myself today, married, gallon bags of animal bone and corncobs in the freezer to boil for stock.

I am far away from the cities of my girlhood, cool concrete of their stairwells. The new therapist wants a list of compliments I’d give myself on behalf of those who love me, and all I can come up with is resourceful. For a time I believed myself in love with Orpheus, which only meant I loved what I could make if I were free from what happened to my body.

That man who would never touch me, kept distant and without danger by the barriers of fiction. Then I believed the work would save me.

I have no real use now for those Greek myths, their dead girls, women raped by men and animals. Today the door is locked. Today

nobody is outside. Muscle cramping mid-lap in the dark blue water.

Now I embroider flowers in dim colors in my new country of flowers, clumsy stitches through the stencil of an orchid, remembering my younger mouth pressed to a flute, unable to release the breath.

I’d liked that he was a musician, fingers long as spring onions.

As a child I ruined my sweaters, the sleeves tugged down to cover my hand before touching any doorknob or handling coins.

Teenaged, loitering, urgently lonely. The cotton t-shirts curled at their sliced hems. Now I am thick-fingered and practical as my mother and her mother, smell of bleach against ceramic.

Gone is L’s humid little apartment, violent stain on the bathroom tile, a bottle of crimson nail-polish shattered long ago and leaving streaks like blood. Her dirty living room where I slept for nights on end, though my own apartment was nearby, cleaner—

I can’t imagine them, the poems that softened the hearts of gods, the poems that changed anything.

That night, metal of the fire escape against my bare legs, I accepted my first cigarette and she allowed me to tell the entire story

without using the real words. The night cooling and gathered close.

The way nothing ever feels truly clean

in summer. And all I know about Eurydice

is that she died. My every other fact about her is about him.

PROFANITY

1

i know ninety-nine names

for my god & none for my [   ]

a failing not of my deity but of

my arabic  not the language

itself rather the overeager mosaic

i hoard  i steal  i borrow

from pop songs   & mine

from childhood fluency i guard

my few swearwords like tinkling

silver anklets  spare & precious

& never nearly enough to muster

a proper arabic anger  proper arabic

vulgarity only a passing spar

always using the names of animals

i am not polite  i am only inarticulate overproud  of my little arsenal

a stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss

through the window of my taxi

& i deploy my meager weapons

[dog]   [pig]   [donkey]

& finally   my crown jewel

i pass my tongue across my teeth

crane my neck about the window

& call   [your mother’s     ]

2

now i know the worst profanity

what men use when they need to curse one other

to cut

word i only know as a swear

your mother’s  your sister’s mine in arabic the word hisses

traps the tongue between the teeth

spits

word so similar to an english kiss

turned to venom by inflection

to rot in the mouth

site of shame

birthplace of the profane

but what word can i use to call my own

how   without disgrace

can i name my innocent parts

my wounds

i am saying if asked in arabic

i could not tell you where i open

HOW TO SAY

in the divorce i separate to two piles     books: english  love songs: arabic

my angers  my schooling my long repeating name   english english arabic

i am someone’s daughter but i am american born  it shows in my short memory

my ahistoric glamour  my clumsy tongue when i forget the word for [  ] in arabic

i sleep   unbroken dark hours on airplanes home    & dream i’ve missed my

connecting flight  i dream a new & fluent mouth full of gauzy swathes of arabic

i dream my alternate selves     each with a face borrowed from photographs of

the girl who became my grandmother  brows & body rounded & cursive like arabic

but wake to the usual borderlands  i crowd shining slivers of english to my mouth

iris  crocus  inlet  heron   how dare i love a word without knowing it in arabic

& what even is translation   is immigration  without irony   safia means pure    all my life it’s been true    even in my clouded arabic

Click here to view this poem as text

TAXONOMY

i go to meet the poem & it will not meet me so long as i believe i am owed

i call it by the name i learned first   

which always sounds to me like  

without their vowels they are the same,

the poem & my brother’s hair

these days the longest i’ve seen it since we were children it curls around his ears & for that sweetness i have no name though i must still write it down because otherwise i will forget as i have forgotten so many others

words i mean & also the suffix built in to mark my labors

specter, daughter, agent noun attached to the verb of my origins a sheet dotted with blood, a thumbprint against the dotted line

& even if i am not tender i must tend

& though i am only part water i wait

& like any number i numb my vulgar parts

the word as i learned it first just means girl my mother’s girl, grandmother’s grandgirl

garland of egyptian jasmine

we call my grandmother’s grandmother nena

which might not be her real name but i never thought to ask

& before hers the names for me go silent

& i do not know what to call those women

my great grand others, my agents, my tender nouns the name i am owed will not meet me

though i fast until the corners of the room crowd with specters though my body swells with the volumes of this blood, though i spilled it

though i read that family honor is in the body of the girl, i spilled it i overflowed & was called a flower

i grew up mapless & was pointed to a maple tree i shrank my own body until the blood stopped coming until i dropped my every suffix & woke up to the sheets still white

INFIBULATION STUDY

I will begin by writing a sentence about cutting. I will begin by writing a sentence about silence. I will continue by writing a sentence about cutting. I will proceed to ask the question about cutting. I will proceed from this point without euphemism. The question is about the clitoris. I call my cousins in turn. I ask the question about the clitoris. I will begin by writing a sentence about the clitoris. I will begin with the assumption that we each continue to have a clitoris. False. We do not talk about this.

I will begin with speculation about our mothers, that each continues to have a clitoris. False. We are never to ask. In the silence, my youngest cousin asks if our grandmothers were cut. We were meant to proceed without euphemism. The Arabic, however, does not allow it. The Arabic, cut by euphemism. We do not use the word cut. The word we use, left intact, is purified. I will ask. I will begin. I was born & allowed to mature uncut. I was born with a clitoris & remain uncut. I was born unnamed & upon arrival was given my orders. I was born & named for a woman who died. The Arabic here allows for nuance. My name, ours, is not the same as the word we use to mean cut. That word, conjugated, is the name of one of my grandmothers. I will not ask her the question. I am told she does not remember.

POMEGRANATE

Because I am their daughter my body is not mine.

I was raised like fruit, unpeeled & then peeled. Raised to bleed in some man’s bed. I was given my name

& with it my instructions. Pure. Pure.

& is it wasted on me? Every moment I do not touch myself, every moment I leave my body on its back to be a wife while I go somewhere above the room.

I return to the soil & search. I know it’s there. Buried shallow, wrapped in rags dark with old & forgotten rust, their discarded part. Buried without ceremony,

buried like fallen seeds.

I wonder about the trees: Date palms veined

through the fruit with the copper taste of cutting.

Guavas that, when slit, purple dark as raw meat.

I have to wonder, of course, about the blood orange, about the pomegranate, splayed open, like something that once was alive & remains.

POMEGRANATE WITH PARTIAL NUDE

i know my history

the ocean froths over my thighs

so cold i taste metal

three coasts away from the airport road

seven countries from my garden city

& then of course the water

of course its copper taste

pomegranate in my throat

color of all my sisters

color of all the girls i know

their names peeled & sucked

their names spit like seeds from car windows

their names clinging to every lower lip

to every rupture

sun sets on the pomegranate city

& where are my sisters

where have they gone?

Click here to view this poem as text

Click here to view this poem as text

MEMOIR

In winter I’d pierced my nose & prepared to move to that city to be an artist, & late in the summer I did. Hours of highway then the sudden clog of one-way streets, sweet stink of garbage overflowing in its bins.

In the new city I was not marked. I named myself & was believed. I wore blue eyeliner & allowed musicians to court me, parade of freeform dreadlocks & perfect tattered white tees. I met him the day I returned from Cairo, seven in the morning at a diner because my body thought it afternoon, because he never slept.

I lived on the twentieth floor & the wind sounded like crowds of women screaming. For years I loved him & could not keep the secret. I rode the train at any hour in any direction. I broke dawn in stranger’s apartments, someone always singing, someone always unearthing a hidden guitar.

We slept on each other’s floors & never asked. Dollar pizza darkening a paper plate, our bodies crowding the F train, crowding the Lower East Side.

The thrill of a party where no one went home, hours in the park colored by the changing light. The long walk from uptown to the village. We were like children left to govern ourselves, cheap metal blooming green against our skin in the heat, cups of mostly milk & sugar, singed taste of the coffee underneath. I harbored every day the fear that he would die. I

held my breath when I passed cemeteries, ladders, any naked, flickering bulb. I pierced six more holes into my ears, tended each summer to a new infection. I wore Doc Martens until my feet bled & never broke them in.

I thought I’d stay forever. I thought we’d all live. More than I wanted to make anything, I wanted to stay alive. More than the thick stink of the summer, our knotted and painted bodies filling the train car with noise.

Left alone I’d collapse for days into bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, feeling the ache of my fingernails growing long, my chemicals going sour. I only wanted sleep. I did not want to die. So I left. It was six years to the day, an apartment I’d loved. I escaped, I think, with my life.

Because I loved him I look up, every few years, his name to check for an obituary. I tend to my infections, salt water & clean cotton.

There is so much I have forgotten, so much I did not think to record. My shorter hair. Those first moments after waking, my eyes still shut, trying to remember where I’d slept. I look through photographs, our younger faces filling the frame, our bodies always touching. I did not think of it as a time to survive. I thought we’d all still know each other, & that we’d all still be alive, meeting years later to retell the story, exaggerating every detail, the cartilage fully healed. I set the table as if someone else is coming. But I got to the other side. I left everyone behind.

Don’t ever go into a room alone with anyone. Even if they’re family. Our mothers’ first warning & the start & finish of our sexual education: Desire as violence, desire as cause for harm. Turning away from kissing scenes on television & thinking, you’re hurting her. Older now & still afraid, we kept quiet for years & when the quiet was breached it emerged that we all had been. Lacuna where the word should be, not even a euphemism in its place.

All the verbs I know name the doing as undoing. & I work every day to forget the word virginity, but without it I don’t know how to tell the story.

Alone in a room waiting to be touched & hoping it will not hurt. Alone in a room waiting to be hurt & hoping I do not die. Clamping tight around the bruise & tending it. Dirigible animal inside me fleeing, only the allium taste of sweat. Wet to the elbow in sour dishwater beside our faraway mothers, cruel kings of our girlhoods, from whom we thought we wanted freedom, from whom we needed care. Our mothers who were girls before us, afraid before us, raising children into the fear. When I was hurt I cried like a child for my mother, for what she must already have known. & who she could not tell. For what I will not tell her.

∴

ON EID WE SLAUGHTER LAMBS & I KNOW INTIMATELY THE COLOR

i ride an uber spilling the last of the day’s ginger light driver handsome enough to pull listening sounds as he chats our talk is casual at its center

but at the edges i taste an old brittleness

memory of something burnt

he circles his mouth to an electronic cigarette

& its vapor braids into the earth & vinegar smell of sweat you are muslim he tells me

not a question  & i nod

smile at his smoke-dark eyes in the mirror

i count the prayer beads

strung in a necklace from his rearview

ninety-nine & perfect

glossy & unworn

mine are sandalwood

& leave their perfume

when cabling through my fingers drink? smoke?

he demands an inventory of my wickedness

in the way men of my faith think me immediately theirs daughter & sister & wife

always a test & never asking my name

in the rippling mirror

my head uncovered

extra button undone from my shirt

i know this exchange & its right answers

a blink & head shaken no

he squints his endless eyes

at a red light he turns

counts what he sees in my face

& the light drips in to share our ride

new vermillion along our bodies

i blink again & measure his disbelief

i am tired in the new dark

& ready to confirm whatever he decides i am for a moment of quiet

moment to rest

my loosened hair smells of coal floats over the backseat like smoke

A RUMOR

say i was a girl with more triggers than eyelashes say every hand on my body that heard no & remained was a husband to be rid of through a process of paperwork say like a good muslim girl  say they all were a kind of husband say the imagination of wedlock was a cure

for the dark & copper taste

say he was a good man he would never  say his listening gaped like a fasting mouth  say i must not have said no or say he would have heard it   say if i didn’t keep so quiet they would know what i meant

say it could be heavy & shining like the quivering sadness of fish say i could not tell my mother   say the doors of my girlhood were locked tight to keep the hands out  but say they trickled in through the gaps say i was raised to be untouched

& say i was touched  say everywhere the world enters me

leaves behind a wound  say because i love shame i am ashamed to have been hurt   say the aching makes a low hum at the base of my remaining life

say my disgrace becomes my obsession  say i roam for days at its borders touch it to my tongue

MODERN SUDANESE POETRY

my husband works his fingers

into the knot muscled against my spine  & my dead stay dead   my hair a knotted cursive language

my ligature  my grief barely literate  my amulets knotted around my neck & wrists   my language my language   cursive & silent   glottal & knotted

& scarring the cheeks of my dead  adorning the hair of my dead  tallow in their braided hair

i read the books in translation  where is the poem

& circle every word i know     acacia  lupin sandalwood & ash   they ululate  my dead

they squat like brides   over clay pots of smoke a yolk suspended in each open eye   & some

in truth are not dead   my dead   & i am who is lost  who is not counted among the living

the poem is not owed me  i was wed in all the colors of my dead   the reddening  the borrowed gold

i wrote the poem in translation   i wrote the poem in the loophole  i wrote the poem in cursive

i snarled it  i picked apart the threads & wove a shroud i was wed in it   i unfastened  i broke my fast with apricots furred like the ears of my dead  i looked laterally

for ancestors   i descended left & right  i read the book in arabic  knew each letter & its sound  & did not recognize the words for tallow  for ululate  my dead my languages  my ligatures  smoke in my loosened hair

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE

a girl embroidered

a girl teeth bared  locked inside a photograph

a girl dances to the same coiled song    can never leave keeps her looks       outlives the other guests filled up with all her teeth    never returns from the party is never heard from again    is everywhere

Forgotten But Not Gone      

cries into your drink & returns it to you

makes you say her name   salt in the well kills the whole village

BAD GIRL

[a bad girl]      they will spit at my sentencing but i was not bad at being a girl   i thrilled at it i excelled at smallness     at smoothness

at epilation by sugar & the folding away of smells dousing oil into my underarms    my underwear

my cottons bone dry      my every virginity

sweet & rotting    jasmine piled into my lap i wore every white dress  i was primed to show blood

SELF-PORTRAIT WITHOUT STITCHES

i was hurt  i wasn’t   i saw it

on the internet  licked yogurt

from a spoon while the girls

described their blood  hot seizing

the cotton of a sheet  i am speaking

from the cut place from my other

mouths  do not believe me for i

was never cut or i was hurt but

never sewn  or  i wasn’t i want

-ed it i didn’t  i screamed i didn’t

i bit down  i bled  i didn’t  i click

through pictures of the girls moonfaced

thick-cheeked still fastened to the

roundness of childhood  consider

the softness of my jaw  my face without

angles without edges  i covered

i cowered i didn’t  i cried  i came to

i click & learn their names incant them

i learn the names of the stones the theory

it wasn’t me  i think of all the ways

we match  it could have been it

couldn’t  consider the cut place thick

liquid of citizenship spilling from my many mouths  uncut  my many

uncut mouths

∴

THE ANIMAL

i was a child greedy in my skin hungers   my stomach churned by festival meat  the lamb in the courtyard with its necklace of rope   gone & in place of a memory pools of its blood in the dust  where i played barefoot with the cousins  wearing the small boys’ alallah for which i cried  until mama habab sent for the tailor crisp pinstriped jalabiya & its smart striped trouser i took great care to keep it pristine  & cried on days it was taken from me to wash  twisting on the line like my truer body   now i am the farthest

i’ve ever been & the fabric tears  canopy of fig trees arranged in place of mothers   i face homeward & feel once again that i am longing   for my uniform to return from the water   that i am waiting for the animal i took care to name  to wake & nuzzle its wet face into my hand

i wake on festival days    & reach for something to wear

& find only that bright chiffon  that irritating clanking of bangles i wake on festival days to the smells of charring animal

& no one to accompany me to the prayer  no one to look upon my naked feet   no one to touch me at all

PASTORAL

if we ever again meet i have a story about persimmons to make you laugh, how i mistook them for tomatoes.

i have a story about bay leaves, plucked from the side of the road, one forgotten & crisped perfectly, dried at the bottom of my purse. i want to show the way california inflects my speaking, california in its frankness, long seasonless line, clear clauses, the bay & the lake like parentheses. days like an orange peeled

in that unbroken spiral.

i place inside me figs & nectarines, gnarled tomatoes of the season, limes split & salted to eat like we did in childhood, collected as cousins, faces always sticky with fruit. our parents in forgotten shapes among their siblings, wearing their first faces, bickering at the table. the way i tell the story i am outside looking in, but in the photographs we are indistinguishable, us children, enormous eyes & unbrushed hair, a drooping sock, dressed in each other’s clothes.

in the memory we are a single organism, our hundred legs & arms shining with vaseline, our feet the color

of dust, in motion. when we meet again it will be as strangers, & i will offer my story about persimmons to show my absent mind, my great forgetting, & i imagine you are polite as we have all grown up to be, laughing into the air between us.

THE CAIRO APARTMENTS

The cousins as barefoot children floating out of polished rooms. Together we clattered between floors in each other’s jalabiyas, spectacular games of hide

& seek, three floors & a roof to search. I can’t remember if we made the songs up ourselves, where is the bride’s house? Ali Alloy prayed his prayers boarded the boat worked his labors. The specter of our adults in the mornings & nights, their strained & hushed voices. Our grandmothers were beautiful & suited to exile. Enormous coifs of blackened hair. Silk scarves only for driving. The eyeliner tattooed, eternal livid stain on the rim of each eyelid, bare faces forgotten in childhood. Our mothers were less glamorous & always tired, always at work, wore bluejeans, cool hands that carried us to our beds at night. I loved exile & the close quarters it afforded us. I loved it enough to stay gone when all the others went home, moved on, unlatched their shuttered houses, beat the carpets & kissed their neighbors & cried. The apartments were emptied. I return to Cairo years later & look for our child-ghosts kicking a ball in the corridors between unfinished buildings. The time Almustafa tripped & opened the skin of his palm on a fallen brick, how I wouldn’t look up from my book to see what he was trying to show me, how he wrapped the bloodied hand in a dish towel & pressed down until our mother came home. I cannot find us. I more closely resemble now the young parents that corralled us, creased & shot through with sadness. There will be no children of my own to carry to their waiting beds. & the city that belonged to me has gone, was never mine, I dreamt it, I wrote it down, invented it,

made all of it up, everything but the smell of corn roasting sweetly on the street below. The carved wooden shutters. Motes of dust arcing through the light. A workbook splayed before me, strained cursive in the feminine conjugation. Why I didn’t look up. He didn’t say he was bleeding. The shopkeeper remarks that I look very clean for a Sudanese. Ya samar ya samara. Ya asmar ya asmarani. Upper Nile. Silt color. Who taught you to speak Arabic like that? I don’t know where the cousins have gone. I don’t know what countries we’ve settled for. I imagine everyone back home, that they might have been playing for hours without me. My brother still with the faint stripe of a scar down his palm, remembers the stitches were done without anesthesia. The doctor telling jokes to distract him.

ZAMALEK

Late August, what I’ve always understood

to be deep summer, crisp again in the aftermath of the heatwave, the fires still burning distant redwoods, though I am once again wearing

socks & a sweatshirt to sleep. I pull a blanket across my knees

& try to remember the particular scents of all my loved ones: my grandmother in Chanel No.5 & hair warmed through to release its curl. Instead I remember the smell of my own hair burning for years of school photographs, dark sheet of it arranged around my shoulders. I remember the puffed sleeves & white collar of the uniforms at the British school where I spent most days silent, in awe of the Egyptian girls & their glamor, with my own hair braided into a single thick sausage, its outward curve against my sweating neck. I am nearly certain we will never again meet. Those were days

of chicken hearts by the club pool, with the classmate whose mother was a known actress, their hair reddening in the sun. I think often these days of Egypt,

dusk blotting the day’s heat, sweat cooling & raising the hair on my arms. & of those girls, the children of the rich, whom I spent my earliest days orbiting, before returning home to describe to my grandmother the particulars

of their carpets & plates. I was forbidden from returning to Noura’s house after she was given first a dish to eat, chicken scallop & french fries thick as my uncles’ fingers,

& only when she was finished was I offered her leftovers.

I wonder if she’s still alive, if she too is afraid, the night around her swallowing its handful of degrees in Celsius, while she remembers an earlier self & the other characters in the story, whether she remembers me as one of them, whether she as well is wondering if I am one of the ambient names eaten by this virus that reminds us of the faces of the forgotten, too late.

I don’t know why I remember her tonight, & all those girls,

the sleekness of their uniforms, something always not quite right about my own. & the one day a year for which I’d burn for hours beneath a dryer, hurt pink of my scalp, to arrive with shining curtains of hair for the photograph. In my isolation my braid grows to new lengths it hasn’t seen since childhood.

My skin clears & I tilt my face into the steam of cardamom floating from the clay cup. Tomorrow I will lose them all again, those girls, those years, my childhood of uniforms & expatriation.

I have forgotten them already, even tonight,

my memories offering no faces, barely scent. I know only the scents of my new life, distant smoke gnawing at an ancient tree, cut apples in the morning. I do not want any of what I’ve lost.

I want only what I have now, to keep it.

GENEVA

It’s 1999 & I remember the school bus in silence except for the song whose lyrics list the names of women, its endless loop that year. In school I track the brief switches into English, enough to overhear about my clothes, my strangeness, testimonies from gym class that I run “like an African. ” By silence I mean that I did not speak the language, a trait that found me in the early countries & remained. & in gym class I tug myself away from the steady rhythm of the group jog, ask my body to go & it does, faster & it understands my language. What has changed, what is different about the girl in that story? The language of the asking? The language of the body? I say run & she unfurls roots, faster & she starts to cry. In our group text, Basma says I grieve most for our younger selves. That cloistering, that cosmic silence, the belief that if we were told in any detail what we weren’t allowed to do, we would take from the details instructions for the doing. Told only, instead, don’t. Never. Good girls don’t. Older now & tending each keloid, everything we allowed to be done to us in silence. To ask for help would be to speak & of course we never spoke. Go. See her, running, little bird in full possession of that body. Little animal, faster, untouched. Of course I tell the story because I fell. Going too fast & tripped, shot forward, projectile, a hand put out to brace my pitch. Hot spread of nerves registering the breaking bone.

Iodine, gypsum, plaster of Paris. Months later, clean slice through the shell of the cast, & my freed arm, grown used to the weight, floating upward like a balloon, like a hand raised to speak.

TONY SOPRANO’S TENDER MACHISMO

I know him: Three buttons undone

down the baobab chest,

quiet humility of the wisping hairline.

I watch him cup a face in his great paw to kiss a cheek, exact manners of my first beloved men,

sturdy & brokenhearted as cattle, my uncles, watches matting the thick hair of their left arms, brother-aged & fathering into my empty spaces.

My father was gone & into that great room

they poured, big-shouldered boys, hot streak

of anger at each center. I was a child wealthy

in shoulders to climb, swung from arm to heavy arm, tender booming of my name in that chorus

of approving mouths.

Gifts shining & breakable in their hands:

fairy-science of the music box, tiny chime

of each earring, bracelets narrow & silver

as their silent, injured wives.

I am their smart girl & they are proud.

I watch him, my uncle who is not mine, thirteen years after the show stops airing, & I love him

like the child forgetting her abdicated father.

He smiles like I delight him. My love justifies his every crime.

I pretended not to hear how they talked

about bitches & golddiggers,

the news stories with hurt girls naming

their injuries, consensus that they are lying,

that they must have been asking for it.

I am home from college & stepping into

their amber scent of cologne & old sweat,

their wounded animal smell, their every tender misogyny, for a quick kiss on the crown of my head—

Now their girlfriends are my age, now younger,

& now the news about the famous predator floods the screen

& when one uncle changes the channel & mutters about a setup I watch the flood take that room of piecemeal fathers where I’ve kept them installed for years.

Its debris includes the stories I kept quiet,

everything that was done to me that I will not tell them.

Includes every word tossed about to name women, how we all thought they didn’t mean me.

SUMMER

Summer of failed hairlessness

of clogged follicles inflamed

In the afternoons I ride the bus

thighs newly bare & sticky against the seats Though I am not allowed, I wear shorts

I am left for hours alone

Light of the computer

blue in my oil-slick face

Summer of danger

Summer of want

My body swells in shapes

I do not understand

I am hungry for touch

& ashamed to be looked at

In the silence I know

something is coming

The blood comes & comes

clasps itself to denim, to sheets

The afternoons are still with heat

humid as a strange man’s breath

& when it happened

I watched flies coating old fruit

Metallic layer of bodies,

their frenzied feeding

The long afternoon of my life,

long life, long season of rot

Click here to view this poem as text

∴

SYROS

Roads spiraling upward, whitewash of the houses, little island in late May. My friends & I descend in our hundred shades, three airplanes & a ferry to arrive, our rumpled linen clothes & earnest smells.

Sleepier than the neighboring islands, their nightclubs, here we rent two tiny creaking cars & flush beneath every curious stare. We drive over cobblestones older than my surname, landscape of scrubby trees & bougainvillea.

Stark lapis of the waters, narrow streets crowded with battered cats, one-eyed & carnivorous. The sea still clinging to the chill of late spring, too early to ease into summer.

We swim dutifully & emerge shivering, to slippery plates of cuttlefish, cola in the glass bottle, sweetened with real sugar.

Each hunted in the country we departed, we came to crowd a shared house, shared perfume of its plumbing, taking turns in the mornings frying eggs. In loose arrangement on the beach, we sit mostly in quiet, a book tented over each sleeping face.

& in the town square in the evening, I let my breath go still, looking up into hundreds of lit windows like stars. I lean into sun-warmed rock, cooling in the night air, & think in another life I’d be a historian. & then it comes to us, in English, its inflections unfamiliar so I think at first it’s Greek. Here, at the opposite end

of the world. Niggers. Niggers. & it was called to us by children.

TERRA NULLIUS

First a blue room in a quiet house, cooling as the sun sets. Though they live with her parents this is not my mother’s childhood home, the house old but new to them, bought cheaply from a Greek man bankrupted by gambling & drink. To be born in the country of my origins would be to have killed my mother. Suggestion of Cairo, short miles away & with better hospitals. She shakes her head. America. I uproot her & she crosses the water.

Nairobi, Cairo, Geneva, Dar-es-salaam. I see the world without understanding what I am seeing. District of Columbia, Brighton. First the meeting of two rivers, then a city where they join. I am old enough to choose a country for myself, but by now I do not want one.

Now my mother on the far end of a phone line, I am thinking about going home. Thirty years away, & it is still there on the other side. My cousins trickle back as if answering a summons. A house on a street named for my third great-grandfather. Children borne under that watchful eye.

Now a little apartment where my flowers die & I leave them there. I take the pills & every month a simulation of that blood. Nobody’s country. It rains & the roof leaks, the ceiling darkens. The forest burns & I know it, that carbon smell, from somewhere else. Then the quiet of the tile, cool ceramic against my back. Then my body in the water displaces the water.

SUDAN, TX

Land of the Blacks, they named my country—

at the driving school my instructor seized the wheel when I continued to drift into the left lane, not yet taught to regard the great machine as more of my body. My first years here I would grow alert, as if called, thinking it was that name I heard being spoken, of our dark concentration of bodies, only to learn it is a kind of car, the sedan, blackening the air with exhaust, waste gases I imagine to be named for the act of depletion, tired lungs of the car sighing for rest.

I say they who named my country & don’t know to whom I refer—British, Ottoman, Egyptian, crossing the threshold

& declaring, This land. Black. Everywhere the smell of metal, known to me only as the copper smell of blood. I did not pass that test & have since forgotten what I learned, thirty years old

& still unfit to drive, to drive as in to thrust, to plunge, to learn the responsibility of great violence. Machine in which I sit

& become a hazard, meaning danger but also meaning chance or venture or fate.

Its etymologies claim Arabic, al-zahr defined as chance or luck though I only know it as flower. The Arabic which also names

my country, Jumhuriyat al-Sudan: Republic of the Blacks.

In the elevator a woman draws her child closer to her side, handbag flattening between them, when my brother & I enter

& smile, threatening great violence. I learn of a Sudan in Texas, population 958, named by its postmaster who never said why,

& without the prefix Bilad, meaning land of, the name of the city is Blacks. In the photographs it could be anywhere, long flat stretch of road, power lines & grass. But I want what I am promised.

Thick cough of exhaust, then the great machine arriving, my body sighing for rest.

TAXONOMY

because i cannot find the words

because i know only euphemism for my tenderest part i name that absence of a daughter

in the feminine tense

lacuna   caesura

in the tradition of naming girls for absence

safia   pure

or the grandmothers’ grandmothers whose names i never asked because i cannot find the words

or because i will not speak them

those worlds   i will not speak them

because language coarsens through my teeth because demur lives inside demure but inside of restive is rest because i want to contain my own solution

i should want as well to dissolve

BORDER/SOFTER

& then how boundless could i make my life

which for all its smallness still exhausts me

balancing act of all my margins all my conjugations of cannot   if i live through the night i will bleed into all my edges until i am no longer a stroke of some careless man’s pen  after

a particularly liquid lunch [ man ] was said to have created [ country ] with a stroke of his [ implement ]

& isn’t a map only a joke we all agreed into a fact

& where can i touch the equator  & how will i know i am touching it    & where is the end of my country the beginning of the next  how will i know i’ve crossed over

ODE TO MY HOMEGIRLS

smelling of orange rind  of cardamom

most beautiful girls in the world  wake up bitch we’re getting waffles   you can keep crying but you’re going out  my marriages

my alibis  my bright & hardy stalks

of protea  & all i know of love i learned

at thirteen  dialing basma’s home phone

by heart   to three-way call whatever boy

so that weeks later  when the phone bill came

only basma’s familiar number beside the time stamp clearing my name   basma herself staying awake

for hours to hang up the phone after

you who send pictures of your rashes

to the group text   & long voice notes

from the bathtub  your laughter echoing against the tiles you who scatter the world’s map   piling into

cheap buses & budget airlines  four of us asleep

in my dorm bed   six of us overflowing my studio apartment  false lashes for weeks after like commas in my every pillowcase   you clog my toilet

& admit it  you text me screenshots

from the gucci fashion show  getting rich

so i can get u this  & when i lived alone

& that man followed me

one night home from the six train

up lexington  & into the hallway

tried for hours to break open my front door

you took turns from all your cities  & stayed overnight with me on the phone   for three days snoring & murmuring in your sleep

∴

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE

perhaps a cow

some gold

for a girl

carried kicking from

her father’s house

from her father’s name

& slung over a shoulder

& passed

to another

whose belonging will name her

will give her form

girl like water

shapeless without the bowl

girl  perhaps cut

perhaps in the pharaonic way

sent off to be split

girl as paintbrush

sent off to stain a sheet

perhaps by cover of night

perhaps the husband is old

& the girl a child

legs clamped tight

as if by stitching

perhaps his brothers

perhaps his cousins

men as ropes

as chains

brought in

to peel the girl like young fruit

the pith still bitter

still clinging to the rind

ELEGY

see her: little cousin, little sister, sparrow-boned, alive.

i want to turn to firewood everything that hurts her.

i do not have the verbs for what i need for her.

i needed them myself & was not protected.

i want to make ash of this world that did not protect us

& from that nourished soil sprout one better.

at the kitchen table we eat a glutinous stew

with our soft hands, submerged to the second knuckle

& she is telling me a story & she is telling it quickly short chirp of her laugh as she tries to mold from it the joke, the old story of our girlhoods; the ways we haunt

the houses built to keep the world out, to keep us safe; the ways we still were hurt; the ways we could not tell anyone what was done to us; the ways we swallowed blame, smooth pebble in the shut mouth; the ways we could not tell our mothers when we needed them the most. i see her & i am fourteen, i am twenty-two, i have been badly hurt. i see her, little mouth, bare-faced & vulnerable. i see her & don’t know where to begin.

1,000

My roommate one year in college

would say of my smallness

that any man who found me attractive

had a trace of the pedophilic

& I would shrink, newly girled

twenty-one with my eyebrows plucked

to grownup arches, sprouting back

every three weeks in sharp little shoots.

Already men have tried to steal me

in their taxis, corral me into alleyways

of the new city. Already the demand for my name though no one ever asks how old I am,

though no one ever did. I feel creaking

& ancient in the repetition of it all.

I feel my girlhood gone for generations

my entire line of blood crowded

with exhausted women.

Their unlined faces frozen in time

with only a thickness about the waist, a small shoot of gray to belie the years.

I make up names to hand to strangers at parties.

I trim years from my age & share

without being asked, that I am fifteen,

seventeen, & no one blinks.

No one stops wanting.

I am disappeared like all the girls

before me, around me,

all the girls to come.

Everyone thinks I am a little girl

& still they hunt me, still they show their teeth.

I am so tired, I am one thousand years old.

One thousand years older when touched.

SUMMER TRIANGLE

say i formed a body of clay around

a clot of dried blood

i formed a body of dirt & water

i formed a body of water around red earth & cracked clay i formed a body polluted by want

most of it not mine

i formed a body purified by name

washed in the white water of my grandfather’s blind left eye washed with my grandmother’s feet in ablution

i formed a body to be left behind

to be unzipped & discarded

to return to perfumed aunts

arranged in jagged sleep

waking only to tie systems of jasmine into my torn hair i formed a body suspended in utterance

named & undone & named again

girl  lacuna  specter  throat throat  [say it]  bloodstain  sheet  [name it]

i formed a body darkened by blood the moon tugging its irons from my shameful parts i formed a body & swam

inelegant laps in rising water

temperate as the first womb

& always ships darkening the banks like blood

& always water dividing the world

god’s country clotting out between my legs like silk

PALIMPSEST

i wear the dead girl’s clothes

all my adornments pulled from the bodies of animals ambergris & musk & tallow

i smell it in my hair

i stink of my every mother

my fingernails bright & rotted in henna

my fingernails kneading raw lamb & dried onion i wear the white & mourn

i wear the amulets bound in leather

i write it down

to dissolve into water & drink

i did not stand bare before a mirror i did not invite the eye

i did not surrender to the drum

beaten to pull dark spirits from the bodies of women mesmeric dance

mesmeric twist of the cigarette smoke

i did not smoke

i burned the sandalwood & recited

i burned the sandalwood & memorized

i waited in the dark for something to fetch me

HARDER/BORDER

my each & every name my casing   a border

my body my mouth my failing tongue a border

my grandfather milk pooling in his hopeful eye

[say it]  i lost a language & grew another border spoiled milk my curdling citizenship my liquid

spilling citizenship   my missing names a border poured everywhere & drying in the yellow morning my body is touched & i claw the air for my borders i misplace my homeland mispronounce my mother

tongue  [again]  [louder]  [harder]  [border]

imagine my mirror mouth its boundless dark all

my alternate selves better  broader  bolder  border louder thinner [say it]  though purity is [i know]

an invention  she bleeds blacker brimming  border my grandfather’s girl  matching milk [

] pure

citizened & born backward  imagine me softer border

ODE TO GOSSIPS

i was mothered by lonely women

some of them wives

some of them with plumes of smoke for husbands

all lonely

smelling of onions & milk

all mothers

some of them to children

some to old names

phantom girls acting out a life

only half a life away

instead they clatter copper kitchenware

with their bangles pushed up the arm

their fingernails rusted with henna

& kneading raw lamb with salt

with coriander

they take weak tea

upper lip sweating in the steam

hair unwound against the nape

my deities  each one

each sandal slapping against each stone heel

their funk of sandalwood & oud

i worship the bright chiffon

spun about each head

the coffee in the dowry china

the butter biscuits on a painted plate

crumbs suspended in eggshell demitasse

when they begin:

i heard        people are saying

i saw it with my own eyes

[   ]’s daughter       a scandal she was wearing [   ]    & not wearing [   ]

can you imagine?

a shame             a shame

∴

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE

i cover my shoulders in a photograph so the hissing will quiet i cloister my vices

i maintain my weight

i never cut my hair

i am asked to change my dress

i am asked to line my eyes

never an order only the slight apology

[people will talk]

i am asked to take down the photo

i am asked to anonymize my lover

stop showing my teeth

cover my knees

shave my legs

stop wearing red

start wearing makeup

stop wearing lipstick

stop being photographed at night

people will talk

what will they think?

what will they do with my name?

∴

/bint nas/ n. daughter of People; girl with a Name; unbroken yolk as reputation; daily maintenance of Name; girlhood governed by Tongues; reputation as system of value; virgin; sane; oiled & brushed; fluent; chaste & shy; reputation as condition for Name; reputation as condition for daughterhood; reputation-shaped urn;

;name;

∴

They cut the hair of disgraced girls so I cut it myself.

Took the razor to it myself. I wanted to feel the bone, its hardness, untouched skin against its newborn curve. & thereby purified I slept, only to wake the next morning to it returned, the same puffed braid I wore throughout my girlhood. The baby hairs brushed down with cream. Two thick elastics like the knotted ends of sausage. & again in the mirror I made the cuts, fat tufts drifting

like feathers to carpet the cold tile. I walked everywhere with scissors, left hair on buses & at parties, cursive scrawls in other beds, handed it in fistfuls, stuffed in pillowcases. Whole braids still bound with their elastic, curled in commas on the pavement behind me, scattered like acacia pods, my ellipsis, my thousand confessions.

∴

i was twenty-four & almost died & nobody knew i was [fourteen][sixteen][twenty] & nobody knew i was sick in my heart in my blood i fainted the train i was [            ] i fainted the [man]

started moving i started to empty from my body while it fell started moving i started to empty from my body while it fell everything suspended & viscous i fell very slowly everything suspended & viscous i fell very slowly i had time to name it before a stranger caught my weight i [could not] name it [& keep my name] a stranger [    ]

& later i kept quiet told no one i knew what they would think

& later i kept quiet told no one i knew what they would think i knew what could be said i knew what stories form i knew what could be said i knew what stories form when bodies float into the tracks before trains  i fell

when bodies [    ] [   ] [    ] [   ]   i [  ]

& was caught & the next day brushed my hair & dressed

& was [not] caught & the next day brushed my hair & dressed loosely & chastely & went on hollowing all mouths of my name loosely & chastely & went on hollowing all mouths of my name

∴

i obeyed & still

i covered & still

i prayed & still

i stayed home & still

i dressed loosely & still

i plaited my hair & still

i was unpainted & still

i was a child & still

i was an adult & still

i moved cities & still

i lived with roommates & still

i lowered my eyes & still

i cut my hair & still

i was polite & still

i was silent & still

i was alone once

i was lonely

it was dark

it was daylight

i was a girl & like the girls i knew

i bruised i bled i died

∴

/sum·’a/ n. reputation; shared root with

/su·mi·’a/ n. hearing; as

in; i heard that man’s daughter was seen [  ] while wearing [   ] such a shame with that complexion that hair she could have been [  ]; i heard that man’s daughter smokes cigarettes & opens her mouth to laugh such a shame she must not have a father; i heard that man’s daughter is no longer that man’s daughter & cannot close her legs; i heard that man’s daughter lost her People lost her surname when she lost her [    ]; i heard that man’s daughter was never a daughter has no People has no reputation has no Name;

∴

what small freedoms could i exchange for my name for my Name for the sound people make when they daughter me for my cage for my for what people hear in the absence of my cloistered body for the sentencing after [i heard] for the sentences locked away before my name my Name pries itself open my name my Name prized above my body above my mouth my name shrouds my body magnifies its every act my cage

my Name my cage my reputation my unbroken yolk my unstained sheet my cage my stage my blood my sheet my

∴

But what if I will not die?

What will govern me then?

How to govern me then?

What bounty, then, on my name?

What stone   What rope   What man will be my officer?

FOR MY FRIENDS, IN REPLY TO A

QUESTION

I’m okay. And, of course, I’m not,

but I go through the motions. I wake up

to the alarm’s howl, even when the word

in my body is no. I dress in livid colors.

I blacken the hairs of each eyebrow. I bake

& braise & pickle. I write & read & lose hours to the blur of the television. I sit

for hours in the bath, my skin puckering.

I don’t know if I’ll ever go home again.

I don’t know who I’ve seen for the last time.

The Arabic comes back to me in streaks

of paint, verb forms & vocabularies

I may never again have occasion to use.

My days smudge into one another & it’s not

that I am afraid. It’s as if I am watching it

all happen below, & I am somewhere above

the room, wondering if the rice is burning.

I am somewhere above the room, watching

my new aches, watching the news as if

I am reading it in a novel. I look up

the names of people I knew in childhood,

learn their new & angular faces, their faraway lives. My grandfather pixelates

into a smile & I work my creaking muscles

to replicate it. I do not ask if we will ever

meet again, I do not ask him to read to me,

or for anything that will make me long.

I dull it with sugar & oil, with cooking shows, with sleep. I sleep twelve hours each night

& in my dreams I am fleeing a war, in my dreams I am touching the faces of my friends, we are

each one of us touching, & even in the dream we are afraid.

RED NOTE WITH A LINE BY OL’ DIRTY

BASTARD

If you read this in red don’t think I didn’t survive. Every day I go missing: One eyelash at a time or sometimes all at once. & in the absence of disgrace I walk in & out of rivers & wear my good silk. My good clean unburnt body dripping in the honey light. I sprout leaves. I bear fruit & self-sustain. I tread water. I flake the moon for my boundless hair & another grows in its place. I am sistered but never again to a dead girl. Nowhere, ever again, is there a dead girl. Somewhere our wounds seal; our stitches fall away. Somewhere a rope turns & our feet never touch the ground. Somewhere a song plays & names us with each touch of a needle to the shining surface of its black: I’m hanging out /partying / with girls / that never die

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE

a girl buried

to the chest in red earth  her wrists

bound beneath the soil

with twine a crowd gathers

to father her     its infinite

hands  curved loosely around

a stone     small enough

that no single throw  is named

as cause of death    no single

hand  accountable to the blood

a girl  undaughter   unnamed

unfaced  undone from the lineage

her photographs    pulled already

from bookshelf from walls  a father

among the hands    his pebble

streaked with quartz  the first to rise to carve the air & arc toward the girl

the rootless tree   faceless & erect

& perhaps the stones    twisting

like fireworks       the girl

their nucleus      rise & rise

for a time     opposite of rain

opposite of hail & perhaps the silence

a beat too long      & another

another      & then a rustling

of wings       above the girl

a flock     thick mixed cloud

of avifauna   partridge & nightjar

& golden sparrow    & avocet

& lapwing    & every other sort

of plover   & ibis & heron & gulls

though the sea is far & to the north

& the minutes pass & the girl is untouched

& each bird in its beak  tongues a stone

NOTES

FINAL WEEKS, 1990

This poem was written in response to a prompt from Louise Glück to write a poem that takes place the day you were born, in which both the time of year and time of day must be clear. The final line is after a line by Warsan Shire:

“I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together.”

ORPHEUS

This poem is built of scraps of poems written during a 30/30 in August 2020

with Hala Alyan, so while these poems are not “after” poems of hers in the conventional sense, I believe them to be shaped by the presence of her poems in my inbox during the time of their writing.

PROFANITY

The first section of this poem is published in POETRY as “self-portrait with profanity.” The second half is published in FUSION as “ode to swearing.”

HOW TO SAY

This poem is written after Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “In Arabic” and originally appears in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

YASMEEN

This poem originally appears in POETRY. This poem was also the kernel of an idea that later became the novel-in-verse Home Is Not a Country. I found Tyehimba Jess’s book Olio incredibly instructive when I was working with the contrapuntal form.

TAXONOMY [I GO TO MEET THE POEM… ]

This poem originally appears in Pleiades. The line “family honor is in the body of the girl” is based on a quote from an anonymous source in the Vanity Fair article “You’re Essentially a Prisoner”: Why Do Dubai’s Princesses Keep Trying to Escape? by Vanessa Grigoriadis. The original quote is

“family honor is within the girl—her virginity is the family’s honor.”

INFIBULATION STUDY [I WILL BEGIN BY WRITING A SENTENCE… ]

The first draft of this poem was based on a drama therapy intervention called

“doubling,” where the therapist listens to a client tell a story, then repeats back an interpretation of parts of the story, followed by “if this is true, repeat it, if it is not, correct it.”

POMEGRANATE WITH PARTIAL NUDE

This poem bases its title on what I think is the title of a painting called

“Pomegranate with Female Nude” that I thought I saw in a book about Salvador Dalí once and wrote it down, but now I can’t find it. I wrote this while listening to the song “Ph City Vibration” by Burna Boy, and the lyric

“south side of the river of the garden city” found its way into the poem as the lines “seven countries from my garden city” and “sun sets on the pomegranate city.”

INFIBULATION STUDY [WHAT IS TO BORDER BUT TO CUT… ]

This poem originally appears in Gulf Coast.

ISHA, NEW YORK CITY

A version of this poem appears in the chapbook ars poetica (MIEL, 2016).

MEMOIR

The first draft of this poem was also written during that summer 2020 30/30

with Hala.

[DON’T EVER GO INTO A ROOM ALONE WITH ANYONE… ]

This one too (the 30/30).

ON EID WE SLAUGHTER LAMBS & I KNOW INTIMATELY THE COLOR

This poem originally appears in the Missing Slate.

A RUMOR

This poem originally appears in Barrelhouse and was written at Cave Canem.

MODERN SUDANESE POETRY

This poem originally appears in POETRY and borrows its title from the anthology Modern Sudanese Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). It also appears in the PANK folio Azza fi Hawak: a Collection of Sudanese Poetry.

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE [A GIRL  EMBROIDERED… ]

This poem originally appears in Barrelhouse and was the first poem I wrote under this title.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITHOUT STITCHES

This poem is written after Tarfia Faizullah’s “100 Bells” and originally appears in the Poetry Review.

THE ANIMAL

This poem originally appears in American Poetry Review.

THE CAIRO APARTMENTS

This poem originally appears in The Atlantic and was written in response to an assignment from Louise Glück to write a prose poem that uses conventional capitalization and punctuation.

ZAMALEK

This poem is written after Kim Addonizio’s “New Year’s Day.” Another August 2020 30/30 poem.

GENEVA

This poem originally appears in the Columbia Review. 30/30.

TONY SOPRANO’S TENDER MACHISMO

Yet another August 30/30 poem, written after watching The Sopranos for the first time.

SUMMER

30/30!

TAXONOMY [WANTING WAS MY LANGUAGE FIRST… ]

An early draft of this poem was written as a commission for the program book for three works of Wayne McGregor’s that premiered at the Bavarian

State Ballet in 2018. The poem was particularly inspired by the piece

“Borderlands.”

SYROS

This poem is written after Jenny Xie’s poem “Corfu” and originally appears in the Columbia Review.

TERRA NULLIUS

This poem was written in response to another prompt from Louise Glück which, among other elements, required the word “then” to appear five times in the poem.

TAXONOMY [BECAUSE I CANNOT FIND THE WORDS… ]

This poem was written while spending a lot of time with Ladan Osman’s poem “Trouble.”

BORDER/SOFTER

A version of this poem appears in the Progressive and the section in italics refers to “Winston’s Hiccup”—“after a particularly liquid lunch, Churchill was said to have created Transjordan with a stroke of his pen.”

ODE TO MY HOMEGIRLS

This poem originally appears in BOMB and is written after Matthew Olzmann’s poem “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem.”

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE [PERHAPS A COW… ]

This poem originally appears in POETRY.

ELEGY

Another August 2020 30/30 poem!

1,000

A version of this poem appears in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day.

SUMMER TRIANGLE

The first draft of this poem was written in response to a piece by Laura Christensen, originally by the same title and since renamed “To Dwell Midst the Waves,” as a commission for Laura’s book “THEN AGAIN: Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty-One Writers.”

HARDER/BORDER

This poem was commissioned by and originally appears in Art Papers.

ODE TO GOSSIPS

An earlier version of this poem appears in POETRY.

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE [I COVER MY SHOULDERS… ]

The third section of this poem originally appears in Ambit. The last section of this poem originally appears in POETRY.

FOR MY FRIENDS, IN REPLY TO A QUESTION

This poem is written after David Ignatow’s poem “For My Daughter, in Reply to a Question” and appears in Catapult.

RED NOTE WITH A LINE BY OL’ DIRTY BASTARD

This poem is written after Danez Smith’s poem “summer, somewhere” and originally appears under the title “after” in West Branch, as well as in the

anthology Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. It borrows the line “I’m hanging out/partying/with girls/that never die” from Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s verse on the song “Ghetto Supastar” by Pras featuring ODB and Mya.

GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE [A GIRL BURIED… ]

This poem originally appears in POETRY.

For our younger selves.

For Basma and Awrad, every time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the book I was most afraid to write. I am so grateful to my communities for holding me and caring for me and keeping me safe during this work. To my sisters, my siblings, breaking free of that long silence.

Thank you for trusting me with your stories. Thank you for hearing mine.

Thank you to Nicole Counts, my editor, for your tender attention, for seeing the book inside this book so many drafts ago. Thank you to Kwame Dawes, most trusted caretaker of my poems, for your guidance and your rigor (and for putting this book in its correct order). Thank you to the team at One World for giving this book a dream home, and to Tabia Yapp for helping me wish this life into existence.

Thank you to my teachers, to the classrooms of your living rooms and text threads and emails and coffee shops and phone calls and workshop spaces. Thank you to Louise Glück, under whose mentorship my poems grew up and began to assert themselves, to punctuate themselves, to speak clearly.

Thank you to Kamau Brathwaite and Eavan Boland. I am grateful my time in this world overlapped with yours. Thank you to the homies who underwent several rounds of manuscript boot camp with me, over several years, to get this incredibly unruly manuscript under control: Fatimah Asghar, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Justin Phillip Reed, Donovan Ramsey, Jay Ellis. Thank you to my homies who are my home teams, Team Mashallah (Angel, Hanif, Kaveh,

Fati) and Team Cowork (Liz, Clint). Thank you to Camonghne Felix, for your sisterhood, for everything you’ve taught me to do. Thank you to Alison Rollins for our Monday exchanges. Thank you to Hala Alyan for inviting me to write 31 poems in the 31 days of August 2020 together—my love of your work made my poems better, imagining you reading them on the other end.

So many of those poems found their way into this book, and shaped it. Thank you to my Stegner cohort, to my Beotis family, to the communities that nurtured and raised me: Cave Canem, the DC Youth Slam Team, Slam! at NYU, and Split This Rock.

I was given the gift of space and time to draft and revise these poems, and that gift made this book possible. Thank you to the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford, and to the residencies at Troutbeck and SPACE on Ryder Farm and Cave Canem. In your care I relearned to write poems, and found my way into this book.

To my family, my families, I am so lucky to be your girl. Safaa El-Kogali, I am so lucky to be your daughter. Almustafa Elhillo, I am so lucky to be your sister. Habab Elmahdi and Eltayeb El-Kogali, I am so lucky to be your granddaughter. To my cousins and aunties and uncles and nieces and nephews, thank you, I love you. To everyone who came before: I will spend the rest of my life making sure I know your names. To Awrad and Basma: Most of these poems were texts between us first. Thank you for making me brave, for keeping me safe, for our 20 years and counting. I am so lucky to be married to Christopher Gabriel Núñez, who every day makes me a life I love, makes me laugh, makes breakfast. You are number one, very best. Thank you to Margarita and Fernando and Karina and Tatiana and JP and Tía Olga and Tía Fanny for welcoming me, for loving me back.

I don’t know how to end this. I can’t believe this book is finished. I can’t

believe it’s going to be in the world. Thank you for reading it. Thank you for hearing me out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sudanese by way of D.C., SAFIA ELHILLO is the author of The January Children and Home Is Not a Country and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the Arab American Book Award, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she is also the recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in POETRY magazine, Callaloo, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others.

Currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in Oakland, California.

safia-mafia.com

Twitter: mafiasafia

Instagram: safiamafia

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YASMEEN

i was born   i was planted

at the rupture the root where   land became ocean became land anew i split from my parallel self i split from   its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth

the girl i also could have been   cleaving my life neatly

& her name / easy / i know the story   & my name / taken from a dead woman

all her life / my mother wanted   to remember / to fill an aperture with a girl named for a flower   cut jasmine in a bowl whose oil scents all   our longing

our mothers /   our mothers’

petals wrung   wilting

for their perfume   garlands hanging from our necks

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INFIBULATION STUDY

what is to border but to cut    say it  say it as you mean thin membrane dividing    the world & the world of men a body i can claim &    a body to be forgiven its breach a body to be sliced like festival lamb    a body named for what it daughters

both of them my blood to clot    both of them my gnarled protest to my many mothers i only ask    the thin membrane of their girlhoods when we became the officers of men    students of purity for men whisperers of spells & prayer & ruined name    wielders of scalpel & sharpened rock

to cut away what frightens men    i only ask about the knotting sugar to uproot the fine down of hair    making slow velvet of our bodies answer me    what is it to border

which knives are for the animals    which ones are for the girls who drew the first blood    answer me

who hurt you    who hurt you

who drew the matching wound    who made the first incision

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ISHA, NEW YORK CITY

i should want to survive   to outlive

my particular beauties   i should want to survive long enough to forget   ever wanting to be touched

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TAXONOMY

wanting was my language first    i learned it as a child waiting  water was my language first    watching women dye their hair in the bathroom at night

each turn of the moon tugs new blood    remembering [GIRL] married at sixteen

to join my other losses    married is the only word i know stain of henna for a girlhood    though this does not feel like the conjugation

red clay where a father might have been    an action performed onto her fluent in neither purity nor pollution    maybe not an action at all

& instead settled quietly at the borderlands    maybe one morning she was a girl & the next a wife

when i was born (not born) (i was planted)     not an action but an exile into a damp alphabet of silences    to [GIRL] it was done at fourteen

& i want to ask whose children are children    clearing away her dolls in the afternoon

endless maw of that empty mouth    before her husband came home what to name it what to name    an imagined girlhood  untouched

i call out to whatever made me    a girl running outside going copper in the sun

& the white moon resumes its quiet swim    imagining a girl  imagine nothing is done to her

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Document Outline

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Epigraph

Part One

Final Weeks, 1990

Orpheus

Profanity

How to Say

Yasmeen

Taxonomy

Infibulation Study

Pomegranate

Pomegranate with Partial Nude

Infibulation Study

Isha, New York City

Memoir

Part Two

On Eid We Slaughter Lambs & I Know Intimately The Color

A Rumor

Modern Sudanese Poetry

Girls That Never Die

Bad Girl

Self-Portrait Without Stitches

Part Three

The Animal

Pastoral

The Cairo Apartments

Zamalek

Geneva

Tony Soprano’s Tender Machismo

Summer

Taxonomy

Part Four

Syros

Terra Nullius

Sudan, TX

Taxonomy

Border/Softer

Ode to My Homegirls

Part Five

Girls That Never Die

Elegy

1,000

Summer Triangle

Palimpsest

Harder/Border

Ode to Gossips

Part Six

Girls That Never Die

For My Friends, in Reply to a Question

Red Note with a Line by Ol’ Dirty Bastard

Girls That Never Die

Notes

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author