Sisters' Entrance

by Emtithal Mahmoud

  An activist pulling peace by the skin of your teeth,

  talking to humanitarians and politicians—

  your words a useless currency,

  their lives slipping through our fingers

  Faster than the earth that swallowed them.

  You insisted they depended on it.

  Dad, our lives depended on you

  and every time I had that thought

  the guilt would force the tears back through my eyes

  telling me not to be selfish.

  There are things so much bigger than father-daughter.

  Your dad doesn’t belong to you.

  I know, but Dad, why are we fighting for a country that never wanted us alive?

  The other day, I walked into the kitchen

  and you were washing the dishes.

  Humanitarian, peacemaker, hero to our people

  pouring soap on a little yellow sponge and washing away the peanut butter jelly from lunch.

  Dad, you’re amazing.

  I hate that I couldn’t tell you that while you were gone.

  Twelve years I learned to live without touching you,

  because people depended on you

  I tried so hard not to do that—

  stopped wiping the salt from my face

  and accepted it: with so many people to carry

  on your shoulders, I couldn’t expect

  you to remember what it feels like to have me there.

  We couldn’t have you, so I had to be you.

  I learned to file taxes, talk to teachers,

  take my brothers to the doctor,

  cook, clean, pray just like you,

  be a father’s daughter in her father’s shoes

  and it was impossible.

  I didn’t know you were holding us together

  with both your arms.

  You’ve been home for months now,

  so I begged you to take me with you.

  I watched from a crowd of faces that look

  nothing like ours,

  families not nearly as frail as our own.

  You argued people over politics.

  I saw you cry, heard your voice

  like it was my own.

  You said, I just want them to stop the killing.

  Baba,

  I did not know.

  You needed your father more than I ever needed mine.

  Yesterday, the cupboard door fell off its hinges.

  You told me to bring you the monkey wrench.

  It was just like holding your hand.

  Millennial

  I want to be owed

  something

  for all this virtue, this

  righteousness—

  satisfaction for sacrifice—

  but that’s not the usual way of things

  so I join a group for young Muslims.

  We hear the insides of our own

  thoughts

  from the mouths of one another.

  There is sorrow here and in that sorrow,

  solace.

  There is joy here and in that joy,

  abandon.

  Such arrogance it was

  to have ever felt

  that I was the only one

  of anything.

  No One Says How Easy It Is to Fall in Love,

  or How Hard It Is to Stay There

  The one you love sits across from you at breakfast,

  maybe it’s your sister, or your father,

  or the one who holds you closer

  than any other person.

  Between you is the coffee, your cell phone,

  or the Atlantic Ocean

  or a pillow covered in your mother’s tears,

  or your self-esteem again

  He says calm down you feel the truth claw its way

  out of your throat

  Pass the butter you say,

  used to the part where everyone asks how you are

  you say okay and they believe it.

  Your survivor’s guilt makes you apologetic

  I talk a lot, sorry

  I think too fast, sorry

  I count the exits in a room as quickly

  as I can count the exits in a conversation,

  sorry

  You try to control it, but that morning,

  anxiety ties your lover to the bed and says,

  let’s play.

  She brings all her friends: the trembling legs,

  the sweaty palms, the indoor voice,

  your relationship.

  You’ve officially been awake for only fifteen minutes

  and you’ve already imagined every scenario

  of things that could go wrong

  on this day.

  There are still 20 minutes left until your alarm rings,

  so you imagine everything that will go wrong

  tomorrow.

  Then it rings. When he smiles,

  the war packs her things and says

  I’m leaving. The walls stop closing in,

  the ceiling isn’t inches from your face

  and you’re back in Paris, under that starless sky.

  You think about kissing him,

  but the Imam walks in

  dangling salvation from the tip of his prayer beads

  Saying things about how God speaks softly and carries

  a big stick, as if his sermons

  weren’t phallic enough already.

  Then your mom brings eternal damnation into

  the picture.

  The temperature rises and you’re not sure

  if it’s hell or the way his eyes look tonight.

  You feel like a lie in that red dress,

  heaven and hell and adolescent hormones

  are picking you apart in that order.

  You kiss him anyway and for a moment,

  you can breathe without a ticking time bomb

  on your oxygen tank.

  You recognize the irony of a Muslim

  with a bomb metaphor and pray to God the CIA

  can’t read your thoughts.

  The city falls away around you.

  The night air feels like a summer harvest.

  The CIA, the Imam, and your mother convene in the corner.

  The bible starts looking at you funny.

  You kiss him again and think this must be how the Red Sea feels when she tastes the Atlantic on a breath of wind.

  But fear clamps down on your neck

  so he says it first, too soon, and too quickly—

  you listen anyway.

  Bite down that thing you read somewhere

  about how those who love first

  are the first to go.

  When he looks at you, forget everything,

  spend the next eternity making up

  for not saying it first:

  carry him—the way the Nile carries Lake Victoria,

  hold him, the way a traveler

  hangs on to the North Star.

  Love him the way the Dead Sea loves Mount Everest,

  how they envelop the peaks and troughs of this planet,

  let his best days sink into your worst,

  and his worst days into your best

  make home of this.

  Every body of water, every drop,

  every rain makes you think of him

  and you’re both from the desert

  so you can’t help but feel you’ve spent

  your entire life at his mercy.

  When he leaves you, it doesn’t stop raining.

/>   You’re left drenched in the desert,

  something you prayed for.

  You start to wonder if the continents ever call for each other on the cold nights.

  Or if Venus ever reaches for Saturn,

  or if the moon ever wants to come home.

  I tried to forget you, sunk all your memories

  in the river

  but the waves keep tossing them back.

  I want to believe that I’ll see you again,

  but we don’t live long where I’m from.

  Venus is weeping in my arms

  The hardest part about watching you leave

  is that you can.

  Anxiety ties you to the bed,

  the war unpacks her things.

  Islamophobia

  Representation is a conversation we are seldom

  invited to.

  Tower Two

  A night of waiting and

  they didn’t come for my mother’s throat,

  my sister’s hijab

  A night of waiting and they didn’t take my father’s robes

  Crush him once for his faith and once more for

  his skin

  A night of waiting and the president said we were neighbors

  And the Imam cried for the towers and our flags

  hung high over our doorsteps

  And our families did not fear for our lives

  And 300 girls did not disappear

  And no one went to war

  And the teachers didn’t treat me different

  And the students didn’t keep their distance

  And the man on the corner did not ask me if I

  were a Christian

  And the refugees did not cover the shore

  And hundreds of thousands did not leave their homes

  And Darfur did not go unspoken

  And Syria did not go unnoticed

  And the Congo, Ukraine, Egypt, Somalia

  And young mothers were not detained

  And the beaches did not fill with lifeboats

  And the oceans did not fill with bodies

  And the bombs and the people and the children,

  the children,

  the children

  And my brother was not called a nigger

  And my brother was not called a sand nigger

  And a college boy did not reach under my sister’s scarf to pull her hair

  And no one threw a pig’s head at the mosque

  coming for my head next

  And no one crushed beer bottles against our walls

  coming with marked bullets next

  And the world did not call for our genocide

  And a man did not call for our exile

  And I did not change my hijab for protection

  And the world did not fear the water

  And no one called us progressive as in liberal

  as in good as in tolerable

  as in alive

  And this hijab was not a death sentence

  And this skin was not a death sentence

  And refugees did not mean nothing

  And Muslim bodies did not mean less

  Not at first. The next 15 years left a sour taste in

  my mouth.

  we never hire

  gravediggers

  Choir of Kings

  In the heart of Khartoum, I heard a radio tune

  about a butterfly sauce;

  the brand spilling into our home,

  the meter chosen to make the woman sound

  as fragile as the message behind the advert. She sang

  the best advice my mother gave

  was to use this butterfly sauce,

  and I thought, my grandma’s sauce could eat

  your mama’s sauce three times over

  and still have room for your aunty’s too.

  There’s nothing fire ever taught me

  that my grandmother didn’t already know.

  The way the air would bend to make space for her.

  The ground a canvas beneath her feet.

  Her light unstoppable, her force complete.

  Her blood-orange nails would crack the smoke

  to drop the cloves in—a hidden pinch of sugar

  kept us guessing.

  I’ve never lived in my grandma’s house

  but basically everyone else has—

  the widowed woman and her daughter,

  the homeless man by the market

  the children carried in by the drought

  the tailor, the tinker, the well digger

  and his camel.

  When the famine came, her doors flew open

  the lines of people changing

  the geography of our street.

  Her nest of pigeons by the pear tree,

  the tamarind out back. All her things

  gave of themselves so the people could eat

  like kings.

  She said

  home is a question,

  every one of us an answer.

  so don’t be asking questions

  when you see people in my house.

  I don’t know what it means to not wear

  my past like a fresh coat of paint

  already cracked by the distance

  there still is between us.

  What makes a person?

  Is it the things we lose, the way we crumble,

  the way we fall as if each time is the first

  and last time?

  Is it the change we make, is it our foolishness,

  our strength, the way we die, the way we come back

  from the brink of death?

  How we own everything,

  but save nothing? Is it the things we pass

  down from those before us?

  Sometimes I wonder what

  it would feel like to belong

  to myself. Is it the way we break?

  The way we hurt one another?

  Is it our excuses, the stories we keep

  and the ones we leave out? Is it other people,

  the ones we keep and the ones we leave out?

  Is it the steady solitude of always being

  in one body no matter how much you love

  another person?

  Is it the love we give and the love we don’t get back?

  I count my siblings every morning

  to make sure they’re still there.

  In the back of my mind voices carry.

  My own catches up. I count again.

  I don’t know what it means to not be me.

  Sometimes I smile just to keep existing.

  In her last days my grandmother carried

  hot coals from her clay fire

  away to a pit until the pot cooled,

  halving the coals until the bubbles slowed

  to a simmer the chunks to a smolder

  the embers to ash,

  as if she were replicating her entire life

  in those moments.

  and when she died, the birds migrated

  from her pear tree to her bedside and back

  the radio humming in her old room.

  Her collection of strangers finding refuge in her house,

  a procession of misfits.

  A choir of kings.

  Tarzan

  It’s kind of funny that Tarzan was a white man.

  To just show up somewhere and call it his.

  It’s kind of funny that Disney has a movie about Africa with no black people in it.

  Just a white man and Africa.
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br />   It’s kind of funny that Jane and Tarzan got together.

  Jungle fever without any of the risk.

  But that was back then, right?

  Disney recently proposed the

  Princess of North Sudan movie

  in which the first African princess is played by

  a white person.

  In which a thousand Sudanese queens have their crowns

  usurped by a girl with skin as pale as false gold

  whose father had the audacity to believe

  that he could just show up somewhere and call it his.

  White man plants a flag in North Africa

  is lauded as an excellent father for raping the motherland.

  My bloodline is older than your idiocy yet here we are.

  I called Disney and asked if they ever considered making Tarzan a black man.

  Turns out they did. But they only got three-fifths of the way through the movie before they fixed it.

  I’ve watched them tear apart our land,

  take our crowns, leave our brothers bleeding on the floor

  And now for $12.99 I can see it in theaters

  everywhere.

  The Colors We Ascribe

  Our ancestors built our bodies from soil

  in the creases of their hands.

  We were loyal, not to the men in our lives

  but to the desert clay in our bones.

  This is who we were: fire wrapped in faded skin,

  children of grandmothers, mothers of kings

  until the day our brethren fell.

  When the last breath is taken, flesh turns.

  The colors of life that leave the body are the names we ascribe to our fears; we see rainbows everywhere.

  The irony of fire is that your eyes go last.

  Long after you can no longer feel it sting,

  you can still see it burn.

  In death all our eyes are gray, they mimic the hues of smoke that dance across the sky.

  There are no instructions for dealing with death.

  When the militia opened fire in El Fashir, we saw gold stars fall from the sky, land on every cornerstone, until the buildings began to melt.

  They poured lead from a broken chalice, silver kerosene, crimson flames.

  Ivory when the sun hits bone at high noon.

  Burgundy when blood dries, it chips, as if it’s trying to escape back into a body.

  I can never forget how much death loves my people, the way they fall asleep at his feet.

  Burgundy blankets, burgundy pillows,

  but our tears are colorless.

  There is no hue to shade this pain.