Mona Kareem

TRANS. BY SARA ELKAMEL

INSURGENT STONE

Write, poet;
Hide out in symbolism's pocket.

You feel:
"My blood was never
This red.
It was never liquid."

You see
—in the darkest moments of night—
Your heart birthing a moon with a million eyelashes;
A moon straight from the Death Party.

Suddenly, you spring from the soil—
Suddenly, you dwell in the desert of despair.

You are astounded:
Your arms had never been planted with hair,
Black and numb—
Your hair was once as placid as grass.

Your heart is lonesome
Like daytime without workers.

A thread of rain
Ties your tongue.

You've become a dream—
You've left your body
And set out on the road
Like a stone, facing the hands of a clock...

Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. She is a recipient of a 2021 NEA literary grant, and a fellow at Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. She held fellowships and residencies with Princeton University, Poetry International, Arab-American National Museum, Norwich Center, and Forum Transregionale Studien. Her most recent publication “Femme Ghosts” is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appears in LitHub, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, Poetry London, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has taught at Princeton, Tufts, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (nominated for a BTBA award), Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread (nominated for the Ghobash Banipalprize), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, among others. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (APBF & Akashic Books, 2021).