Nardine Taleb: Returning Home for Quarantine I Forget

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