Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet and artist from Bangalore, India. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Creative Writing in 2018. She was a 2018-2019 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, a 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and winner of the 2018 Button Poetry Video Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl, The Academy of American Poets, The Shade Journal, Apiary Magazine, All Def Poetry, and Button Poetry, among others. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Washington University in St.Louis, where she is a poetry editor for The Spectacle magazine. She believes poetry is the closest translation and is sending love in your direction. You can find her on instagram @sanamsheriff

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POETRY

Gratitude

By SANAM SHERIFF

Let me stretch my mouth wide /
as a summer afternoon /
and say it loud, say it sticky /
say the days and their yellow hands / and the air so open / you could walk inside it