Nardine Taleb: Returning Home for Quarantine I Forget
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
returning home for quarantine I forget
how frequently the prayer call fumbles
out of the computer and never really seems
to end, especially when I’m on work calls
or Facetime with friends or in prostration
to a slice of dark chocolate cake. I’m coming,
God, but on my way to you I loved the world
a little less, couldn’t find all the reasons I danced
in drug store aisles or sang unrestrained in the car
with my windows down. My sister’s footsteps
stop at my locked door: Hey, you there?
Another way to say: Tell me I exist.
I listen with intention to the small things: Mama
brewing coffee; Baba chatting about almonds
being in the plum family. Knowledge to them
is a treasure, and they lift it to their kids and say:
Look. Look at all the things you do not yet know.
The unknowing like a lottery ticket.
The unknowing like a crush to lust for.
My pink childhood walls are chipping,
the chippings questioning my womanhood:
Q: Where are you headed?
A: Wherever the eyes are closed
and the palms are open. Wherever
Mama’s footsteps are imprinting. Wherever
Babas are humming. Wherever
coffee is brewing. Wherever
walls are chipping. Everything
calling, everything not yet arrived
is my calling to rise
is my life
intentions
I will never get married, I say to Mama.
She replies, inshAllah*
the word trailing after her every sentence
through tight lips.
She pulls the vowels of inshAllah by their ears
and her tone shifts, as she summons god.
Nothing, she says, is of our willing:
the dead mouse in our basement, for instance,
a credit to the Evil Eye
or true love a credit to the Right Time,
even our morning rise cannot be a fluke:
god dropping souls back into bodies
like coins into empty glass jars.
But when Mama speaks, he listens:
She clutched a dream to her chest once
and wished for a girl with curls,
a birthmark, a sharp tongue,
and a love that she would be taught to keep,
or churn into power
or whisper into a prayer
or perhaps exhale into a poem.
I was asked at a workshop what I’d rebuild myself as
and I’d rebuild myself into a rag and scrub away at the stain I made on
the carpet stairs of our childhood home. I want to say I’m sorry but
I’ll probably do it again. I’ve accepted my recklessness and spoiled
temperament. If I were a secret, I would be the one to tell it.
I’d rebuild myself, too, into a desk lamp, a door knob, a flower pot,
a tire, a tea bag, a cup stain on our walnut table, a bookshelf,
anything you can’t object to. I worry that no matter what I do
I will never be worthy this way: cracked at the sides, all this
fear bleeding through. You question why I don’t spend time
with the family anymore and it’s because I’ll drop all my truths
at your feet. I say instead, what are we eating for dinner? and
Did you guys see the news today? and Work was good
I didn’t do much. You have this way of glancing at me and
bringing all the sins to my tongue. Don’t look
under the rug, there are several more stains I’ve hidden.
There’s a ghost of you in every good deed that I do.
Will you please pass me the rice?
Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer, speech therapist, and Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, The Knight’s Library Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Emerging Literary Journal, and others. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow. You can find her at the following social media platforms: Twitter: @nardineta / IG: @nardineta
