Two Poems
NOCTURNE / BLUE HOUR
I trace a maternal bloodline to Suakin, exilic island of the jinn, built from coral and overrun
by talking cats
/
As children in Cairo Almustafa and I would sing invented songs in invented language, forbidden
from running after sunset when the veil was thinnest between worlds
/
That blue and haunted hour I’ve loved always for its mysteries
/
Another line of blood reveals a teacher, jinn inside his classroom among the other children
learning to memorize the book
/
I study it alone while crunching cucumbers in the dark, preparing for thirst, loving most
the sacred letters beyond my human mind: [alif lam miim], [yaa siin]: sounds that clatter
in my chest, never brightening to meaning inside my human ear
/
Summer in northern Europe where the afternoons disorient me with their length, the sun insisting
on itself until eleven o’clock at night. Hard to call it night, that twilit color, no word for it
that I like enough to use, nothing as sonorous as maghrib, its echo, first sip of cool water after the fast
/
The call haunts out from the minarets and prickles the back of my neck. I am closer here to the story,
all the ones whose names I carry wrapped in white somewhere underfoot
/
In California I think I am so far and still something collects at the corner of my eye, just outside
my looking, and still I know not yet to be afraid
PALIMPSEST
Amulet at my neck filled with paper
covered in my great-grandfather’s hand
its protection active as long
as I never read what it says
What to name it, this palimpsest
in our practice, holy words
written and dissolved in water
to drink
Years ago, younger
but already a poet
I watched the holy man
at the hospital bedside recite
And the bedridden woman with a limb
wrapped in bandage
The blood for weeks now
refusing to clot
Sitting upright when the word
hit the air inside the room
And screaming
in a long unbroken line
My grandmother making me promise
never to write about it
Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novels in verse Home Is Not a Country and Bright Red Fruit (Make Me a World/Random House, 2021 and 2024). With Fatimah Asghar, she was co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). She lives in Los Angeles.
