by Dana Alsamsam
Today in Syria everything that touches the ground
connects to the dead. The soles of bare feet cough
into malformed or absent coffins.
Rubble is mixed with the ash of many mothers and the men
who sold gem-toned blue stones and golden bracelets
now trembling at the edges of our war-torn wrists.
The lucky ones are buried in white sheets instead of burst
like pomegranate seeds and left
to sour in the Damascus sun.
My father tells himself not to picture our loved ones
dead for fear of too much loss,
a fear already ravaging the clay bodies of all
who hold Syria like a prayer-engraved pendant.
Down the street from my Nana and Jido’s
abandoned flat is a juice shop next to a bakery
with a name that I cannot remember
and I know if I went back it would look different,
no, it wouldn’t be there at all.
connects to the dead. The soles of bare feet cough
into malformed or absent coffins.
Rubble is mixed with the ash of many mothers and the men
who sold gem-toned blue stones and golden bracelets
now trembling at the edges of our war-torn wrists.
The lucky ones are buried in white sheets instead of burst
like pomegranate seeds and left
to sour in the Damascus sun.
My father tells himself not to picture our loved ones
dead for fear of too much loss,
a fear already ravaging the clay bodies of all
who hold Syria like a prayer-engraved pendant.
Down the street from my Nana and Jido’s
abandoned flat is a juice shop next to a bakery
with a name that I cannot remember
and I know if I went back it would look different,
no, it wouldn’t be there at all.
Dana Alsamsam is a queer, Syrian-American poet from Chicago and an MFA candidate at Emerson College. She is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness, yea press, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Poetry East, Hobart, DIALOGIST, The Collapsar, Superstition Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Fugue, Blue Earth Review, and others.