ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Joumana Altallal is a Zell Fellow in Poetry at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She works with Citywide Poets to lead a weekly after-school poetry program for high school students in Metro-Detroit. Her work appears, or is forthcoming in Poets Reading the News, Rusted Radishes, Kweli Journal, and Harpur Palate. You can find Joumana on Twitter @.
Poets Resist
Edited by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro
July 17, 2020
Edited by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro
July 17, 2020
Hair
You are seated in a cheap lawn chair in the middle of my bathroom.
This will become a poem about a flung teargas canister, but first
your hair. The weight of stainless-steel clippers in my hand,
a countertop strewn with half a dozen plastic trimming guards,
the shower rug pushed to the hall. D’Angelo’s voice aching through us.
I am bent over you, combing the tight of your curls.
I am bent over the root of you; a root, a root D’Angelo cries.
I ask which guard to use first and you answer. I plant myself
to the buzz of the clippers, the soft clouds of hair.
Before the gas begins to choke us in Tahrir Square,
there is only this: you, showered, freshly cut, dancing
in the living room. The small, the insignificant.
On a video I did not want to watch, a man cries: look
at the wind, look at the teargas. It’s a hair away from us.
“Hair” is part of a larger manuscript that attempts to recreate my uncle Hafiz’s death in 2005 Najaf while reckoning with the ongoing violence against Iraqis.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
