The Sleeper
✧ 2023 Gearhart Poetry Contest Winner ✧
I am braiding a child’s hair
when my palms turn gray.
When she asks Why did you stop?
I recognize my voice.
I must finish this braid
so I can leave. But I don’t
see a door.
*
The oranges on the trees
look and behave like limes.
The crow’s head is shaved
unevenly like an infant’s.
*
Dina and I are infants again.
Above our bed in the Nile
Delta house, God’s calls erupt
from inside our own ears—
Prayer is superior to sleep.
The light changes,
the lambs grunt,
and blow flies form halos
around our temples.
Even the trees are asleep.
*
I am on trial for living
in a house with no plants.
They give me
the maximum sentence:
I am to pick only one action
to perform on repeat.
*
In the one room I have never
been inside, a body
like our grandmother’s is sleeping
or gone in a sapphire dress
and a white veil so long
it smothers the bedframe.
The wood is the same color
as the earth.
*
A door opens in the soil—
there is even a bed for me.
To wash the spine
with soap, the child tilts
my stiff body to the left,
when suddenly
I am overcome by thirst.
It is the beginning
of the hunger season, she says,
and turns on a faucet
of sand.
Her voice is strange,
as if given to her.
*
Now I wait for moisture
to leave my lips.
I have always hated being wet.
The Days Are Coming in Abundance
✧ 2023 Gearhart Poetry Contest Finalist ✧
Outside the sugar costs more than fuel.
Men are searching the trees.
And here is yet another room
not designed for my body.
When I close my eyes, I am grooming myself
with garden shears; I eat off my old
terracotta ashtray.
I am sleeping through the music
on the inside of my husband’s ears, love hung
upside down by its feet.
God is skinning the night again. A sweet dust
abrades our bed.
Darkness peels off like a sock.
SARA ELKAMEL is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).
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