I’d forgotten the urgency of fish bones –
how the cage of cartilage splinters
between my teeth, hands picking the exhausted
meat apart into limp shreds of tulle, organza.
This won’t save us. Neither will the weight
of mercury stored in each filament like gold,
the scales charred, silvering off my nails
pirouetting in front of him in grey delirium.
Why does the flailing figure still remember
the water that once held it safe, only to push it away?
Tell me, closer, the Arabic word for the sunken
gasp when a needle lodges itself between lungs,
the word for air
when you can’t reach land.
Nadra Mabrouk, born in Cairo, Egypt, is a poet living in New York. She is the recipient of the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the New York University Creative Writing Program, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Her work has appeared in POETRY, RHINO, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), among other publications. She is the author of the chapbook, How Things Tasted When We Were Young (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Currently, she is a content intern for The Academy of American Poets.