Literary Hub

“Keys,” A Poem by Ahmad Almallah

From His Collection Border Wisdom

By Ahmad Almallah

November 20, 2023

I’ve been
thinking
of keys—
clearly:

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

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

____________________________

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.