time
slips off my softened skin
and I grow wings.

By Lenna Jawdat
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poetry

He showed me that our people’s history
is part of the American story

Poetry

REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.

Poetry

& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am

Poetry

Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.

Poetry

When baba worked for the Oil Co. they allotted him / a farm house

Poetry

Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?

Poetry

My family has legends in the form of a spider’s legs.

poetry

He showed me that our people’s history
is part of the American story

Poetry

When baba worked for the Oil Co. they allotted him / a farm house

Poetry

REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.

Poetry

Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?

Poetry

& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am

Poetry

My family has legends in the form of a spider’s legs.

Poetry

Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.