Two poems

by Rasha Abdulhadi

seafaring chest, or what ship may cross this border 

this body is a chest of seafaring gear and unused tablecloths  
times are i go years making passage without unpacking 

there are times, for months, when i lay on more layers 
suffocated sweaters, crushed dresses, wrinkled jackets 

against the bound bones of the chest, the housing that ribcages—
listen here to the wheeze in the bellows diaphragm 

what spider of time some cobweb has stuck to lungs, 
that when I turn the air draws in and dizzy vertebrae swoon—

i can watch myself watch myself recognize the serrated edge  
of consciousness, just one half-breath quarter-turn sinew-slip away—

[the scientists and counselors are concerned, the data shows, the study says
the children (abused) of parents (abused)
who are caregivers (trying not to abuse) 

for their parents (self-destructing) have higher risks 
of accelerated aging, of auto-immune (self-destructing) dis-eases] 

how many fathoms of tears can be inside a person, 
how can youth be a fence inside a person, crossed once and then erased—

i didn't need to seek a border that's been looking for me. 
i don't owe a border anything, even a good chase,  
but i can make a ship of this leaky chest, always crossing
never home, with endless endless endless ahead.

Elegy Nabulsi

I cry for his kerosene, lamp
unlit a bottle broken and in it 
a small model home in which we
never fit neither he nor I, and we
never went back to the place or back
in time—

though her beauty buoyed me, 
salty-smooth—her heat a
glass-bottom boat, her heat an urn
evaporation cooled, her heat a
shoreline shimmering across what I
could not cross. 

Consolation is this dilettante’s
bouquet: unnamed lilac, a mirror
magic act practiced everyday to
undisappear us.

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ABOUT THE CREATOR

Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner who cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. Rasha's writing appears in ROOM, Mizna, Shade Journal, Strange Horizons, and the anthologies Halal if You Hear Me and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. A fiber artist, poet, speculative writer and editor, Rasha is member of Justice for Muslims Collective, RAWI, and Alternate ROOTS. Their new chapbook is WHO IS OWED SPRINGTIME. @rashaabdulhadi on Twitter.

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