most days, during some mid-day hour, / I close my eyes and say the Sh’ma. / But it’s always the wrong time of day, / and it’s the only prayer I know

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.

My life too has ended
many times over. Now I’m
doing all I can to return

even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.

it’s happening / again. everything / outside me / get to switching  / channels. brown black / carbon black / black cat black

shouting / the same words but in different languages

there is nothing but performance; the language that stretches to capture us all

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.

The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.

When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.

My feet moved down another street / and I saw the shape they would draw / on the map in my mind.

Look at my heartbeat / and its consequence, / that cup warm on my palm

How would I know / when I’m empty and quiet like breath?

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

Two white men carrying briefcases walk in on a congressional meeting held by African leaders dressed in Western attire. Clapping at the president who resembles Léopold Senghor. He uses words like “revolutionary” and “independence” and they garner an applause.

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

As my relatives melted, I stood
on one leg, raised my arms, eyes shut, & thought:
tree tree tree as death passed me—untouched.

Hazem Fahmy was a finalist for the 2019 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest and this poem appeared in our arts anthology Allies.

On any map in any so-called season, I can recognize myself at least once.