Tag: Letters from the Interior

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Letters from the Interior by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Morning, Lantern

Miss Sahar had spoken of this sister, Asbaha—
morning verb. And as she spoke a sun
had risen over her words. It was the most arduous lesson,
one that required a tearing apart at the seams, a loosening

of crimson thread cross-stitched in seven-branch
cedars and rows of eglantine. To have
become. More than the desolate stretches
of perseverance, more than the eternally flowering fields

of Kaan. To have become. Full fathoms of night
traversed and then a light upon the corrugated metal
and slumped rooftops of the camp,
gilding the limestone of what was or bluing it

from sight entirely. To have become. To pass
from one form into another, chrysalis dwellers
finally cutting the wind with our own wings.
Asbaha—sister of the earliest hours:

from the edge of sky a call to the smallest prayer
and the sunbirds chorusing, their feathers flashing
sapphire, emerald and Fairuz on the radio, her longing
and the day’s headlines dissolved in our coffee cups. To have

become. To sunder a sorrow from our bodies
and rise to soft unburned wicks, to live.

This selection comes from the book, Letters from the Interior, available from Diode Editions.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Ghoshal.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and has served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature.

Sarah Ghoshal’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Arsenic Lobster, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Empty Mirror, Red Savina Review and Broad! Magazine, among others. Her chapbook, Changing the Grid, is available from Finishing Line Press. She earned her MFA from Long Island University and teaches at Montclair State University. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband, her ten month old daughter and her dog Comet, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Letters from the Interior by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

What Can I Tell Her I’ve Learned

from all these love songs, from a lifetime of mornings
with Fairuz and the news that forces its way
into the house and razes the ground and collapses
the sky and in cycles, for no discernable reason, passes us by?
That love can replace sleep? That so much of a life
can be squandered for fear of forgetting?
That sleep is a staircase and many a grandmother
sat on its first step, keeping vigil, clicking prayer beads?
That in the evening an old bridge is the best place
to watch the fog swallow the road? that October’s clouds
are sorrowing vessels? That rain is an unreliable lover,
and the dry season, ever longer and more scorching, is the only certainty?
That in Arabic love and the wind share a name,
each a motion leaning toward what captures us?
That a breeze tender as July in the valley
can become a verb? That we make promises in the name
of love and its changing winds? That a land
in which our hands have planted an olive tree or harvested
leaves from the grapevine claims us
as mercilessly as a first love?
That a lover can ask for the moon, a metaphor
for sleepless devotion, or for a clear sky
without night raids which we can marvel together
at the burnished silhouettes of the hills?
That we can long for a love to return & to remain a longing?
That even though Fairuz sings Habibi, what’s the use of crying,
what, now, is the meaning of all these words? we return
to the laments, a teaspoonful in each cup? That we portion the day
between ablutions and the stirring
of coffee grounds into a slender-armed pot, troubling
our paltry water supply for alternating sacraments?
That in the eye of an unravelling we’re still singing,
as those before us did, that it buries or sustains us,
we cannot know.

This selection comes from the book, Letters from the Interior, available from Diode Editions.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Ghoshal.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and has served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature.

Sarah Ghoshal’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Arsenic Lobster, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Empty Mirror, Red Savina Review and Broad! Magazine, among others. Her chapbook, Changing the Grid, is available from Finishing Line Press. She earned her MFA from Long Island University and teaches at Montclair State University. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband, her ten month old daughter and her dog Comet, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Letters from the Interior by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Elegy

To lose a homeland you must give away
your stories. No sentences can be saved.

Verbs will break, abstract nouns will collapse and
precious centuries will wither away.

The world you spoke of and the world that spoke
of you is now strafed with smoke. You must burn

the documents that will not pass checkpoints,
the line of refugees thickens, the siege

aimed at your ribcage sharpens its knives. You
no longer want. No possessions,

no hunger for bread. Only a border
passage, the frayed hem of a horizon.

To lose a homeland you must give away
your self. Your words must break open, become

empty containers the shapes of which will
forever remind you of what you had

to hold inside. Beyond the thirsting fields
there is an old road to walk and it is

never paved, never the place you used to
travel in the lemon blossom dreams

you used to have when you owned a pillow or
a lantern or the solace of a language.

This selection comes from the book, Letters from the Interior, available from Diode Editions.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Ghoshal.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and has served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature.

Sarah Ghoshal’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Arsenic Lobster, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Empty Mirror, Red Savina Review and Broad! Magazine, among others. Her chapbook, Changing the Grid, is available from Finishing Line Press. She earned her MFA from Long Island University and teaches at Montclair State University. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband, her ten month old daughter and her dog Comet, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Letters from the Interior by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Miss Sahar Listens to
Fairuz Sing “The Bees’ Path”

If you’re going to go,
if you’re going to scorch this heart
and leave a desert in your absence,
tell me now and I’ll follow the bees.

If you’re going to scorch this heart,
I’ll hem the horizon in solitude.
Tell me now and I’ll follow the bees
inside the anemones scarring the hillside.

I’ll hem the horizon in solitude,
the light lengthening, breaking
inside the anemones scarring the hillside.
I’ll spiral beneath the dome of the sky.

The light lengthening, breaking,
this moment gathered around us
as I spiral beneath the dome of the sky.
Spring is a ravishment forever dying dying dying.

This moment gathered around us is
honey and wild greens and the promise
of ravishment forever dying dying dying.
We’re just another love song, remembered or forgotten.

Honey and wild greens and the promise
of losing you in the desert of what happens next.
We’re just another love song, remembered or forgotten.
Will you stay until the anemones fold back into the land?

Will you stay until the anemones fold back into the land
or leave a desert in your absence?
Are we just another love song, remembered or forgotten?
Tell me now and I’ll follow the bees.

This selection comes from the book, Letters from the Interior, available from Diode Editions.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Ghoshal.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and has served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature.

Sarah Ghoshal’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Arsenic Lobster, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Empty Mirror, Red Savina Review and Broad! Magazine, among others. Her chapbook, Changing the Grid, is available from Finishing Line Press. She earned her MFA from Long Island University and teaches at Montclair State University. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband, her ten month old daughter and her dog Comet, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Letters from the Interior by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Dear Miss Sahar

First Letter

Everyone is gathering in the square
and the square is a center that cannot hold
and the center is alive and burning.

I don’t know how it happened
and yet I’ve known it always,
the poems we sang. Now

I understand—
they were a compass rose.
We were afraid.

the architecture of our cities
is designed to house the fearful.
Maybe we’ve reached the limits of fear,

our bones broken so often
they’ve set in new shapes.
Maybe we are finally free

of ourselves. Everyone
is in the square, Miss Sahar,
and the streets are reclaiming their names.

We’re taking long drags of tear gas
when they fire it into our midst.
Our lungs have been decolonized

or incinerated, I can’t tell. The sound
of singing and the scarcity of sleep
are making me light-headed,

language and all its rules re-ordering my mind.
Yesterday a groom carried his bride through the square,
slender vine of Damascus jasmine. A people’s wedding,

the joyous rave at the end of sorrow. Everywhere
is liberation and chanting
threaded with gunfire. The girls have flowers

in their hair. The boys are sharing their cigarettes.
There is suddenly bread enough
for all of us

or do we hunger for something more?
The time for Kaan is setting, Miss Sahar,
I need a new grammar for this country.

This selection comes from the book, Letters from the Interior, available from Diode Editions.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Ghoshal.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and has served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature.

Sarah Ghoshal’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Arsenic Lobster, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Empty Mirror, Red Savina Review and Broad! Magazine, among others. Her chapbook, Changing the Grid, is available from Finishing Line Press. She earned her MFA from Long Island University and teaches at Montclair State University. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband, her ten month old daughter and her dog Comet, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.