by Morouje Sherif
Every wrist suffers from slippage.
I need to do something
about the water//It has
been cold for weeks.
Tell me where I can
find the screwdriver.
//Tell me it’s too cold//
Some nights, I dream about my mother
only younger, bleating from behind a wall of glass.
I have enough quarters to wash my whites
but not enough to let them dry in the sun.
Tell me how//the windshields fissured
like my brother. And everything is fissured//
where my mother would wash all our clothes
—where we did not know the birds we once ate
ran on blood. Driving me back home with no water,
my mother is afraid she got it all wrong. In one hundred miles,
everything starts to settle the way the moon didn’t recede from earth after slamming so close//I had mistaken tear ducts for the past.
I’ve lost daytime again. In some flashback, someone exhausts the hostas with fertilizer. In the rearview, a mule screams//and detonates into the screen.
Morouje Sherif is an Egyptian-Canadian writer and artist. Growing up in the Mediterranean, she has a vicarious thrill for feel-good compositions and the traverse of truth. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Society of the U.K., Foyle Young Poets of the Year, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Subnivean, The Fish Barrel Review, Plum Tree Tavern, INKSOUNDS, Outlander Magazine, among others. In her free time, she enjoys gazing at the horizon.