{"id":3758,"date":"2015-11-15T14:10:44","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T14:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=3758"},"modified":"2015-11-15T14:10:44","modified_gmt":"2015-11-15T14:10:44","slug":"2-poems-safia-elhillo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=3758","title":{"rendered":"2 POEMS — Safia Elhillo"},"content":{"rendered":"

first adornment<\/strong>
\n 
\nit\u2019s ramadan i\u2019m nine years old drinking juice
\nof crushed & strained hibiscus \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0it darkens
\nmy lips a bitten red \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0& i think i look
\ni look like my biglegged aunts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 their heavy hair burnt
\nstraight & draped with bright & beaded scarves
\ntheir men lost or upstairs sleeping or gone
\nto america to look for work\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 gone to england
\nto saudi arabia to the emirates to look for work
\n 
\ni watch them pick through grains of rice for
\nstones & stew meat in hissing pots\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 i watch
\nthem cake the soles of their feet with henna
\ndye the stonecolored roots of their hair with
\nhenna paint fat flowers on their palms &
\nankles with henna & lie on daybeds with arms &
\nlegs aloft\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 waiting for it all to dry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 i grow
\nolder & watch my own hips swell\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 i paint
\ndark shapes along my arms\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 around my ankles
\n& wait for the stain to set
\n 
\n 
\nan inheritance<\/strong>
\n 
\ndid our mothers invent loneliness or did it make them our mothers were we
\nfathered by silence or just looking to explain away this quiet is it wasteful to
\npray for our brothers in a language they never learned whose daughters are we
\nif we grow old before our mothers or for their sakes they called our
\ngrandfathers the january children lined up by the colonizer & assigned birth
\nyears by height there is no answer we come from men who do not know when
\nthey were born & women shown to them in photographs whose children left
\nthe country & tried for romance & had daughters full of all the wrong language
\n 
\n 
\n\"nn,Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly: a journal of black expression, she received an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia has been nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize, and is co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Her work appears in several journals and in the anthologies \u201cThe BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop\u201d and \u201cAgain I Wait for This to Pull Apart.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

first adornment   it\u2019s ramadan i\u2019m nine years old drinking juice of crushed & strained hibiscus \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0it darkens my lips a bitten red \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0& i think i look i look like my biglegged aunts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 their heavy hair burnt straight & draped with bright & beaded scarves their men lost or upstairs sleeping or gone to [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[192],"class_list":["post-3758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-pyramids-of-sudan-by-fabrizio-demartis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3758"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3802,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3758\/revisions\/3802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}