Editors‘ Note: The following poems by Kamelya Omayma Youssef is part of the notebook I Want Sky, a collection of essays, poems, fiction, and hybrid work honoring Sarah Hegazy’s one irreplaceable life, and the lives of all LGBTQ+ Arabs and people of the SWANA region and its diaspora, and, too often, the risk inherent in their visibility. Edited by Mariam Bazeed and published as a part of a partnership with Mizna, the notebook will also be available as a print issue, released this summer. Continue reading work published in this series here.

After watching that interview with Um Kalthoum, I dance-cried in the bathroom for an hour

After Arwa said something about “not accepting a society that created the possibility of her death” 

for Sarah Hegazi