
WINNER: Praise Us, For We Are Dead
As I read this beautiful poem, entire worlds bristled in my mind. The narrative space of the poem is meticulously managed and the images and metaphors both stun and console. Eventually, miraculously, the poem becomes its own subject: “a / small / act of [a] body / trying to / give someone / a home…” I had to read it several times — to let it change me, to be sure I was in a place to be changed. This is no small feat.
—Billy-Ray Belcourt
An imam shouts over bullhorn feedback, and broadcasts
that we need to welcome and provide for a new Pakistani
family in the area. When it’s Jummah in the
summer, heat lamp suns strike the back of prostrated
necks– sweat communes and rolls off skin
smoother than slurs off lips as you leave the
Islamic centre parking lot. A holy perspiration
crashes in the middle of janamaz fibres
flooding a crater casted by your forehead.
Sit up, set your gaze down, tell me;
wasn’t every ocean first just an earthly wound, we
bandaged with moisture? An incision we have cried
above until we could swim it end-to-end? Aren’t
we all just trying to make torn flesh whole again? The
carpet in the prayer rug, now saturated– wet and
salty as the Clifton shore. This is a small
act of your body trying to give someone a home
that they no longer have. The next week, uncle breaks
shoulder- to-shoulder silence with his cracking joints;
strained knees listento a khutba about partitions.
A sermon honouring the dead halfway around the
world– the ground splits open andtombstones erect in the
middle of the masjid, but my family still can’t find
our ancestors’ graves in Pakistan.
Sometimes ghosts are the realest piece of
something we have left. This poem is about losing
a home, and trying to find it, and failing, and surviving,
and building, and having to house its
haunting.