April 30, 2018

Dalia Elhassan

FINAL PORTRAIT OF THE SUDANESE

my parents sit side by side
in the half-light

two bodies, a half-world
away from me, singing

the way only sudanis know
how to.

eDalia

shuf al-zaman ya yuma
sayignee ba’eed khalas

look at this time, oh mama,
it’s taking me so far

on the uptown 6 train
my father—in sudan

—calls to ask us how we’re doing
are you okay? how’s your mother?

my mother, in the bronx,
waiting for her children

to come home,
to learn her mother’s language,

i swallowed two other languages
before downing my own

gutted my throat
of any accent

spent years tearing
up maps of africa

trying to rub the sandalwood
musk from behind my ears

i don’t bother to learn
the songs my parents sing,

instead i write poems,
about our hyphenated bodies

about the frankincense smoke
dancing on hot coal

about their hands
that never touch

and all the ways
i hardly recognize them.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

__________

Dalia Elhassan: “These poems were born out of years of recognizing difference and paying close attention to the way the world functioned around me as a young Sudanese woman in the diaspora and the complex identities that live on my body. Growing up, it felt like the world I was most familiar with knew very little of Sudanese people or Sudanese culture, lifestyle, art, song, pain, triumph. Being Sudanese in the diaspora is an experience of being asked to identify oneself on a daily basis. My racial, ethnic, and gendered constitution has led me to believe in poetry as a space for radical change and transformation. This space fosters community, self-compassion, and the courage to mark one’s own existence. I have turned to poetry as a space to draw from and create my own reality in the face of oppressive structures and institutions that seek to take that power away from me. The only Sudan I will ever understand a connection to is the Sudan I can find in art and in poetry. Poets like Safia Elhillo, whose work is deeply familiar and feels like home to me, remind me often that the country I build in my poetry is the only country I have an allegiance to. Poetry blurs the lines between the political and the personal. Poetry speaks to and gives voice both to what can be said and what hides in the fabric of silence. In a poem, I can write my experiences into consciousness. I never want to forget or be made to forget who I am and what I came from. I never want us to think of ourselves, as Sudanese people in the diaspora and in Sudan, as a forgotten people. I never want to be ashamed of being Sudanese ever again.” (web)

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April 27, 2018

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING

Forget to turn off the lights and wash the dishes and empty the tub.

Forget the standing water and let it bring ghosts into the house.

Forget street numbers and front doors and languages of all the ones you’ve lived in before.

Forget the names you gave them once. How they were taken away.

Forget home is where the heart is. The heart can’t beat outside the body.

Forget the body. Theirs. Forget they are made of water. Standing.

Forget to lie down. And forget to sleep. It’s too quiet in these walls.

Forget the four walls and the hands it took to build them.

Forget hands. How it felt to press palm to ribcage to the stove.

Forget to light it.

Forget how the cold and blueless dark makes outlines of ghosts glow a harvest moon.

Forget the moon. It doesn’t belong here. Here ghosts are houses inside of houses.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

[download audio]

__________

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: “I emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee when I was six years old. In third grade, I started writing poetry in English as a way of finding my way through a stranger’s language and culture, one that would soon become my home. In the former Soviet Union, my family and I were marked as Jewish. In the United States, we were marked as ‘foreign’ and ‘Russian’ and ‘immigrant.’ In my poems, I get to be the one who marks my own identity. For me, poetry is both an act of nostalgia and future making—a way of reaching back to a birthplace, childhood, and even language that is just out of reach, and at the same time, reaching forward to make room for this past in an uncertain future.” (web)

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April 25, 2018

Floyd Cheung

IMMIGRANT ENGLISH PROFESSOR’S LAMENT ON ASSIMILATION

Sometimes life is so middle-class normal I write
in standard English fucking iambic pentameter
except that one word is a fucking spondee.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

[download audio]

__________

Floyd Cheung: “Raised speaking Cantonese in Hong Kong, I learned English by watching Sesame Street in our house in Las Vegas, whose windows were shielded with aluminum foil to make it dark enough for my parents to sleep whenever they could between their several jobs. Now I find myself a professor of English, and I sometimes turn to poetry to meditate on how I arrived at the life I’m now living.” (web)

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April 23, 2018

Elizabeth T. Chao

QÍ PÁO

                The
               neck
       of my mother’s
   qí páo is too small for
 me, delicate silk fists too
  weak to punch its way
   around my thick pipes
    and clasp in a fixing
        embrace. The
          waist of my
       grandmother’s
   qí páo was too nar
  row for even my twelve-
 year-old paunch. By then
my gluttony for all things
sweet and forbidden had
 corroded and cracked the
   tiny straight teeth of its
    zipper.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

__________

Elizabeth T. Chao: “My family moved from Taiwan to Texas when I was seven. I was in first grade, and I wore a navy-blue uniform that had the three characters of my name embroidered just above the left breast pocket. In America, I wore jeans, t-shirts, and purple shoes to school. In America, the three characters of my name lived in a distant drawer and smelled funny. In America, I learned to dump my leftovers into a big trashcan and feel free to go get more.”

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April 20, 2018

Yakov Azriel

THE IMMIGRANT

Here is good, yes? We are one, yes? This land
of love you’ve brought me to is different from
all lands I’ve known before. I have become
a resident who learns to understand—
a little slowly, yes?—new customs and
new laws. New music, too—to play a drum
and saxophone, you’ve taught me, yes?—and some
new dancing steps, you lead me, hand in hand.

Despite my funny accent and the words
I mispronounce; despite my failure to
improve my speech; despite the way I dress;
despite my dreams in which I speak to birds
in foreign languages unknown to you,
you love me as I am, you love me, yes?

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

[download audio]

__________

Yakov Azriel: “I was born in New York City in 1950, and came to live in Israel in 1971, after finishing my BA in Brooklyn College. Although I no longer live in America, and although I speak Hebrew well, I feel more comfortable writing poetry in English than in Hebrew. I am not sure that the fact I no longer live in the country of my birth is reflected in my poems, but I do believe being at home in more than one language and more than one culture can give a writer a greater perspective and hopefully greater depth. In a sense, we are all strangers.” (web)

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