Quarantine

By HERA NAGUIB

 

Tonight, I halt to prior ghosts 
   that upwell again, funerary as the sirens 
     that shrill through the tracheal alleys. 

            When I tell F., he says, this is America— 
what you leave for her claims you back

            Yes, the fountain veil loping 
over the ribbed Red Sea I wanted 
            to shiver to a whisper as a girl. 
Yes, little caskets of Himalayan 
pine nuts I thumbed each sulfurous winter. 

It’s true I’ve buried all the cities I’ve called home 
            in some lacquered erstwhile ache. 
            How easily I’ve worn 
the sky’s feigned amnesia & throbbed 
            tedious, as the landscape outside 
   where each evening, the same rangy cat 
licks the fungal pool in the balding grass.

What, truly, would I give for repose: to belong? 
To breathe inconspicuous as a dab 
on a box Mother clamps over the still humid 
dinner across that eastern hemisphere 
            where night slinks into every 
            familiar katora and spoon hollow? 

Everywhere, contagion shreds 
being to a minimal question. 

The answer ferments, unspoken & 
            hung over the open bracket of sleep. 

On the news, grounded airplanes 
heckle me with their snouts. 
The earth teethes coffins en masse. 

For days, the mind, a fugitive, 
             seeks to slink from its atlas of disquiet. 

For days, I touch no one. 

I let hours thaw on my nape 
             and outstare a ceiling stain 
             till it sips from my affliction.

 

Hera Naguib is a Pakistani writer who was raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Toronto, Canada. She is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Academy of Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, and World Literature Today, among other publications. Her website is HeraNaguib.com.

[Purchase Issue 22 here.]

Quarantine

Related Posts

"kochanie, today i bought bread" Book Cover

September 2023 Poetry Feature: Uljana Wolf

ULJANA WOLF
legnica your direction is uttered: night halfnight / legnica your sirens rise in the gate-keeper's lodge / and keep the flag on all clear: /            yellow yellow the direction’s right / a crooked wave the gate the cross / legnica in singsong of tracks land trickles away / legnica your sky

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

MIGUEL M. MORALES
Days into the promise of a new year, resolutions plentiful, blossoming, / seven farmworkers were shot and killed harvesting mushrooms in Half Moon Bay. / Those of us who sprouted from families, whose hands and backs worked the land, / waited for news of our farmworker siblings.

A White House against a blue sky, with a watertower on top.

Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
First the marsh grass came, then the motherwort, / then bitterberry and honeysuckle. Blackbirds, / gulls and grackles built their nests. / Mourning doves call from the eaves / of the old factory, closed during the Depression.