Ghazal for Jack Aboud Shabi

November 18, 2018

You rise as if from a dream, your fingers honeycombed in a bowl soaking the tamarind’s tender pulp.
The black-eyed madwoman of Shari’ al Rasheed searches for you, finds your clinic battered to a pulp.

Still, Basra’s thick beds shelter what’s left of waterlilies from the flood-pulses of another heavy spring.
The marbled teal you grow up chasing suddenly shuts its beak, crushing the nabog fruit into a pulp.

The day they come for you, Kahramana’s copper skin turns ugly olive green, her braided crown unravels.
How too, our exit out of this circular city is an unraveling, a pouring and pouring of the boiling oily pulp.

In Arabic: ابحر الرجل the man oceaned, the man became an ocean, the man deepened as if the ocean.
The psychiatric patients in Al-Rashad bite holes through their bagged water, suck out life’s sweet pulp.

After the looting, you stand stunned, a child in the market made suddenly aware of his stutter.
Salam to the hospital beds baring your name, the sounds that almost make a language, carry its pulp.

 


Joumana Altallal was born in Baghdad to Iraqi and Lebanese parents. She is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia and is currently a first year MFA candidate in poetry at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She works with Citywide Poets to lead an after-school poetry program for high school students in Metro Detroit. Her work appears in the Virginia Literary Review, Inkstone, and Jaffat al-Aqlam, among others.

Photograph by the U.S. Marine Corps.

Previous Story

Mein Drumpf: Enemy of the People

Next Story

Her Name Means Hope

Latest from Middle East

Planting Trees

By Devorah Levy-Pearlman. I look out at a stampede of pines over the rubble of uprooted olive trees.

To My Children

By Noa Silver. Each evening, now, I stay awake trying to understand the whole of human history.
Go toTop

More Like This

The Same Sky Stretches Above All of Our Heads

By Shehrbano Naqvi. A portrait of a family in Gaza.

A Dead Child is a Dead Child

By David Adès. The Israel-Hamas conflict is a war on children.