Published in Spring 2024 Online Folio
i claim the corner seat
on the back of this pickup truck
with my uncles whose skins
are the color of freshly ground bun
and habahan
we’re five hundred miles
east of the place where the white
and blue nile meet
i come from a country
where all we sing
are love songs
a country where all
the songs can be about love
or my parents
father not yet my baba
seeing my mother
and her fair skin
for the first time
or the first time she flashes
him a smile/baba guiding
a prayer through the gap
between his two front teeth
or my grandfather planting
a pomegranate tree
in the house my grandmother
prays a family in
or my uncle’s beard
pressing dimples onto
my neck the first time
he hugs me in twelve years
More poems by Dalia Elhassan in MQR’s African Writing Online Folio:
This piece is from our Spring 2024 African Writing Online Folio, an online-exclusive extension of our special issue, “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations,” guest edited by Chris Abani. You can read more from our Spring 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Dalia Elhassan is a Sudanese-American poet and writer living in NYC. Her work has been featured in The Kenyon Review, The Oakland Arts Review, Rattle #59, and most recently in the New-Generation African Poets Series (Sita) with her chapbook, In Half Light (2019, Akashic Books and the African Poetry Book Fund). She is the recipient of the Hajja Razia Sharif Sheikh Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She can be found online @daliaelhassan.
