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I’m not sure anymore / how far joy gets us
a presenter / interrupts a program to break the news of migrants / found dead on the shores of river niger. i look down / the streets through my window.
even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.
I begin to feel my body rise / and I can believe / in what freedom must feel like.
To not have had the luxury to think “the world is over,” but to feel it instead.
My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.
When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.
Look at my heartbeat / and its consequence, / that cup warm on my palm
But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.
As a student, I stitched / a cadaver together / while my professor / said you must / be a predator . . .
I ain’t dead and in this form, / I can matrix my way out of your bullet.
I was also spat across an ocean
and clung to the edge of an unwilling continent.
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
I ask my brother if he can hear cicadas where he is. My brother doesn’t know what cicadas are. He is 40 years old. He asks me to repeat it.
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.
a slave ship hauls / bodies as cargo and / both the surface and ocean floor / rifts. even the clouds break / open in sobs.
loving mother, come watch me be patient, / watch how i describe things that never leave my mouth
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits
If I cross paths with myself on the sidewalk, I’m not sure I will recognize my own face.
The sewing machines have been pushed aside to a far-off world, but I can still hear their thumping
Hazem Fahmy was a finalist for the 2019 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest and this poem appeared in our arts anthology Allies.
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That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.
That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.