Dujie Tahat: October 2018 Poet of the Month
during mass
I’d write
dozens of poems—
all of them
about my mother.
My sister
must have been right
beside me
but I can’t recall,
which isn’t a metaphor
except it is like
when the property manager
gives you the keys
to your first apartment
& suddenly you have to
make a home out
of so many blank walls
or when your lover leaves you
after having made together
a home is what you make
of it. In a church,
my mother hums a hymn
alone
long after another communion
that I bowed my head
before the holy father
& did not receive
the Flesh of Christ.
The word of God
still rings in that room
up in the rafters somewhere
like wedding bells at a winery
like I’ve never been married
in a church before
no matter how much she begged.
in a mosque
that is actually a house,
very sober men huddled
around a broken
window—
a brick the culprit,
fallen towers the shadow
in which Muslims prayed
more often than normal
those days. It was modest—
a craftsman
in a certified all-American
town—not any different really
than any house next to it.
No vaults of heaven—
only unadorned a-frames.
No discernible patterns
in the tapestry of backs
facing the sky at jumu'ah.
A fence went up
around the yard
by Citizenship Day
& dad, it would
be so funny now
if it weren't
so ordinary then—
Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian-American immigrant living in Washington state. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Shenandoah, Tahoma Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His reviews and essays on poetry and politics can be found in Seattle Review of Books and Civic Skunk Works. Dujie has earned fellowships from the Richard Hugo House and Jack Straw Writing Program. He serves as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and interviews poets for The Adroit Journal. He got his start as a Seattle Poetry Slam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices.
