N.S. Ahmed is a first-generation Egyptian-American poet, playwright, fictional writer, and visual artist based in New York City. His work blends traditional Arabic storytelling, folktales, and songs with contemporary poetic and experimental forms to examine the lives, existential predicaments, and narratives of Arabic and Arabic-American people. His writings have been featured or are forthcoming in publications such as the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Hyphen Magazine, New York Public Library, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, The Howling Press, PEN America, and the anthology DREAMing Out Loud. As well, he has held performances and conversations at the PEN World Voices Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, TEDx Talk, Nuyorican Poets Café, The Poet’s Passage, among many other areas throughout the United States and abroad. Currently, he is a CUNY Pipeline Fellow, a CLS Scholar, a Periplus Collective Fellow, and an incoming graduate student and Hertog Research Fellow at Hunter College's MFA program for creative fiction.

ENUMERATE

On Becoming Memory

By N.S. AHMED

Remember, swollen lungs can drown. / I remember her drowning. / I am drowning myself as I write this.