Iman Mersal

Trans. by Robyn Creswell

Black FIngers

Marrying a piano player
is different from marrying a sailor.
They all know that
and so they won’t see you again at port.
The last image of you
will be of a creature dangling from a rope
fingers splayed over her eyes 
while her thin feet hang miles away
from the musical scales. 

The grandmother said Silly chicks are food for hawks
The father said Don’t talk to strangers
The professor said East is East and West is West
The friend from the café said Leaving your homeland is a mistake that can only be fixed by never looking back
The doctor said You’re expecting

The doctor says You’re expecting
and you say No, I’m pregnant
not because it’s more feminine
and not because English is always unfair,  
but because pregnant is a word that feels full of itself
which is exactly what you are. 

Robyn Creswell is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). A former poetry editor of The Paris Review, he currently is an editor-at-large for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux book publishers.

Iman Mersal is among the most celebrated contemporary poets in the Arab world. She is the author of four collections of verse and three works of prose, including How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts, a hybrid of cultural criticism and personal memoir.