The Sleeper

✧ 2023 Gearhart Poetry Contest Winner ✧

I am braiding a child’s hair 

when my palms turn gray. 

When she asks Why did you stop?

I recognize my voice.

I must finish this braid 

so I can leave. But I don’t 

see a door.

*

The oranges on the trees 

look and behave like limes.

The crow’s head is shaved 

unevenly like an infant’s.

*

Dina and I are infants again. 

Above our bed in the Nile 

Delta house, God’s calls erupt

from inside our own ears—

Prayer is superior to sleep.

The light changes,

the lambs grunt, 

and blow flies form halos 

around our temples.

Even the trees are asleep. 

*

I am on trial for living 

in a house with no plants. 

They give me 

the maximum sentence:

I am to pick only one action 

to perform on repeat.

*

In the one room I have never

been inside, a body 

like our grandmother’s is sleeping 

or gone in a sapphire dress 

and a white veil so long 

it smothers the bedframe. 

The wood is the same color 

as the earth.

*

A door opens in the soil—

there is even a bed for me. 

To wash the spine 

with soap, the child tilts 

my stiff body to the left, 

when suddenly 

I am overcome by thirst.

It is the beginning

of the hunger season, she says,

and turns on a faucet 

of sand. 

Her voice is strange, 

as if given to her.

*

Now I wait for moisture

to leave my lips.

I have always hated being wet.

---

The Days Are Coming in Abundance

✧ 2023 Gearhart Poetry Contest Finalist ✧

Outside the sugar costs more than fuel. 

Men are searching the trees.

And here is yet another room 

not designed for my body. 

When I close my eyes, I am grooming myself 

with garden shears; I eat off my old

terracotta ashtray.

I am sleeping through the music 

on the inside of my husband’s ears, love hung

upside down by its feet. 

God is skinning the night again. A sweet dust

abrades our bed.

Darkness peels off like a sock.

---

SARA ELKAMEL is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

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