Naming Things
By Zeina Hashem BeckZeina Hashem Beck performs the poem "Naming Things" at the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
Search Results
Song of the Exiles
By Holly KarapetkovaThere never was a garden
only a leaving:
miles and miles
of footprints in the dirt.
2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, VA
By Marcos L. MartínezThere are immeasurable ways to count days: on the median the sunflower tracks UV streams: east to west then sleep; an acorn gets weeded out of the common area ‘til another live oak drobs a bomb then sprouts till, yanked away again;
Iraqi-Style Fish Shop, Damascus
By Heather Derr-SmithThe fish are opened up like salad bowls,
Slid between the metal bars of baskets,
Roasted in the wood-fired ovens, Iraqi style.
The flesh glows as if it were made of glass.
Attribution
By Jee Leong KohMy grandfather said life was better under the British.
He was a man who begrudged his words but he did say this.
I was born after the British left
an alphabet in my house, the same book they left in school.
Above the Thin Shell of the World
By Marci Calabretta Cancio-BelloI fell in love with a North Korean
by falling asleep on his shoulder
in a South Korean subway.
origin stories (reprise)
By Safia Elhilloi was born in the winter in 1990 in a country not my own
i was born with my father’s eyes maybe i stole them he
doesn’t look like that anymore i was born
in seven countries i was born carved up by borders
#flyingwhileblack
By Imani CezanneThere is no moment when I am more reminded of my Blackness
than when I am at an airport walking through TSA
The Security Administration
Whose job it is to keep the planes from terrorism
Baghdad Before the Occupation
By Amal Al-Jubouri—My solitude, to which I always returned
City that kept my secret religion in her libraries
I came back to rest my head on her shoulder
and with just one look, she saw how tired I was
Leaving My Childhood Home
By Zeina AzzamOn our last day in Beirut
with my ten years packed in a suitcase,
my best friend asked for a keepsake.
I found a little tin box