this is where i find him as a child, the first time he cried, when his brothers dawn slick foot held the bones stuck of his chick/ now my father starts segmenting the years of his
life, as he reads, i see his oil slick body, how he floated here, as in he arrived somehow, passed through what he had to
the soundless spaces between gunshots, what looked like echoless fireworks
he first tells me i ask him to recount again, the night sky, because i am not looking laterally, at this memory, we do not discuss, how he slept on tarpaulin, instead i draw new, star signs, unseeing of the ground
sometimes we watch scenes of a refugee camp turning ember, sometimes we watch a man look to the camera and say i wouldn’t have left if i knew this is when our house is filled with more absences
that i don’t ask my parents to name, the gone, the now-lost, when i was born they were the newly-gone, still had names, torn by grief, that became syllables, that were repurposed into our own
my brother’s live caught name, patched into his body whole from a brother now-gone, or the one who did not live long enough to be transformed, made new uncle to someone
how my brother is forgiven, even after turning glass into dust, how my mother, couldn’t sleep before he did, how he was born with
a mark others would read as soul reentering the body, or
how we are all carrying the spirits, that our mother held,
how this is a hundred small gilt blasphemies, i swallow, for what they won’t explain, who they folded into cotton and their names,
now i know the sea, was drawn still that day, that the earth was beaten from the sun that year, that it happened,
and my father held open a telegram line, long enough for words to be sent to the people that needed them, there is more, except i can’t inhabit those memories, the ones
where his voice disappears and his hands turn air,
i try to listen again this time with my ears attuned to the dark,
and find myself retelling his story as he speaks, this time my father is majnoon and my mother layla, this time every mark, they receive turns gilt and they wake up to pearls instead of children
Asmaa Jama is a Somali artist + poet and co-founder of art collective Dhaqan Collective, based in England. This year, Asmaa was shortlisted for Brunel African Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Wasafiri Writing Prize + longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. Asmaa’s a Cave Canem 2021 Fellow. Asmaa has been published in places like Poetry Review, The Good Journal, Ambit, Ballast and Magma. And have been translated into French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, German and Somali. Asmaa’s writing has been commissioned by Arnolfini, Hayward Gallery and Ifa gallery.