Mona Kareem
trans. by Sara Elkamel
Two POEMS
Genetics
You can't trust anyone who doesn't like oranges
I once had a friend who hated oranges
She’d squeeze her eyes shut, repulsed by its scent
She said she preferred cologne
Or even the smell of burnt rice
Her plump lips hold no emotion
Towards the sweetness, bitterness, or stickiness of juice
Her teeth were strangers to the stripping of an orange
And the stripping of skin in general
I too had a fruit I hated
In those dark days
When we would sit on God's earth
The women in Buddha pose, the men squatted
Surrounding the head of a goat
Standing on a mountain of rice
Like a birthday candle
We gathered in a circle, like a crowd that had arrived too late to the guillotine proceedings,
Just in time to witness the last utterance of the soul. I loved the head
—the betrayed king, stuffed with pride—
My long fingers drag him towards my edges
While I fling small onions to the side
I was born to a country where people eat with their eyes
They can even hire workers to eat on their behalf
To save their own teeth for the execution of greater sins
Some of them complain: How can tomatoes be so red,
And so sugarless?
Then one day, my father decided to buy a dining table:
Our fingers no longer had places to dive and dig
Nor pathways lined with onion rings
Men and women sat equal on chairs
As today's newspaper lingered hungry on the sofa.
Today, I bite into the onion like an apple
Or like the carrots my mother would juice
Desperate to save my eyesight
On the mission that shaped her first motherhood test
“Is it true carrots can help?” my mother asked the doctor
Who nodded with a grin, for in his peasant-brain, her question recalled
A hilarious fable where children are donkeys, and mothers witches
Every day she squeezed carrots
Until everything tasted like carrots
And my eyes opened to visions, nightmares, and stories
Of a woman who turned her daughter into a donkey
That was the last time my mother tried to save me
“Nothing works,” she says.
She no longer believed in fruits and vegetables,
Or motherhood, or medicine.
“You cannot cure mouths or eyes,” she said.
“You cannot compete with genetics.”
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).