Do you remember those mornings we couldn’t even morning? All our verbs were hard-edged, we sharpened our teeth on the morning.
Morbid girls untangling from ancestral lines: a pathway rigid Like the tracks of the fabled Ottoman railway exploding in the morning.
In our Hijaz, girls grew from crescent to crescent. The night was a banned café we filled with cigarettes until morning.
So many words for fragrant smoke. I recall a gilt wedding tray filled With crystal jars of oud & the tale of a friend asleep on her prayer rug by morning.
Some of us wed. Some of us left that Hijaz. Some of us are lost in western Mothertongue. The western side of the world spins you clockwise at morning.
Over many rooftops the world glitters for us, in a sky bereft of ancestors. Name the stars. Stars, name the girls who rise to sing new prayers to the morning.
Majda Gama is the author of the forthcoming chapbook "The Call of Paradise" selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias chapbook prize. Her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, Four Way Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Night Heron Barks, POETRY Magazine, and are forthcoming from Memorious, the Offing, Ploughshares, and “We Call to the Eye & the Night” (Persea, 2023) an anthology of love poems by poets of Arab-SWANA descent. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize, and her debut manuscript was a finalist for the 2020 New Issues Poetry Prize. Born in Beirut, Majda was raised in Saudi Arabia and the United States and is now based in the DC suburbs where she has roots in the underground music scene. During the pandemic she began tending to a Virginia native plant garden that was certified as a home wildlife sanctuary by the Audubon Society and has been co-hosting the Café Muse literary salon online.
& yes i know that stray dogs enter the compound in the dark and sit on the swing & yes i have seen their oblong eyes juiced in meditative silence & yes sometimes i join them
