Iman Mersal

Trans. by Robyn Creswell

IT seems I inherit the dead

After I walked back among all the large shoes
from my mother’s burial,
leaving her to tend her chickens in some obscurer place,
it was my job to protect our house from the neighbors’ spying
and I got used to sitting on the doorstep
waiting for the heroine—the one they always treated badly—
of the radio serials.
The day my friend received a visa
to try out her body on a foreign continent
(and although she hadn’t forgotten, as she usually did,
her cigarettes on my table),
I decided that smoking was henceforth necessary
and soon I had a private drawer
and also a mysterious man
who was in fact my friend’s former lover.

Also
when doctors fail to find a kidney
Osama’s body doesn’t reject—
Osama,
whose kidneys shrivel
because he represses his bitterness for the sake of elegance—
then I might use his thumbprint
while talking to prove I’m here.

It seems I inherit the dead,
and one day 
I’ll sit by myself in a café
after the death of all those I loved
without any feeling of loss
because my body is a large woven basket
where they have left
their traces.

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.