• “Keys,” A Poem by Ahmad Almallah

    From His Collection Border Wisdom

    I’ve been
    thinking
    of keys—
    clearly:

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    the hand holding
    them close to the lock—
    nothing turning
    turning

    just a snapshot,
    reflections, fingers
    reaching for the thing
    in the mirror
    and not the thing

    and that day
    when I couldn’t open
    up: and the door was just
    a door

    not a barrier

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    it was  locked
    and I was  cold, tired, and
    _________________________out:

    my
    fingers freeing and freezing
    but caught

    and I couldn’t hold or find—
    my
    _____way I wondered
    about what happened to the dot
    dot dot

    in poetry

    _____why doesn’t anyone like
    them anymore
    and what’s wrong
    with the cut
    and incomplete

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    ____________________________

    Excerpted from Border Wisdom by Ahmad Almallah. Published with permission from Winter Editions. Copyright © 2023 by Ahmad Almallah.


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    Ahmad Almallah
    Ahmad Almallah grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is an artist-in-residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book of poems, Bitter English, was published in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press in 2019. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his sequence of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among others. HIs second poetry collection Border Wisdom (2023) is available from Winter Editions. This poem is from a collection in progress titled Wrong Winds.





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