For the last four years at The Common we’ve been happy to partner with the DISQUIET International Literary Program, a two-week long conference bringing together writers from North America, Portugal, and throughout the Lusophone world. Our tenth-anniversary edition, Issue #20, featured a special portfolio of “Writing from the Lusosphere”—that is, “Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora, with works in English and in translation exploring Lisbon, Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Mozambique.”
This partnership has also led to our publishing poems by the winners (and some of the runners-up) of their annual DISQUIET Poetry Prize. It’s my pleasure to present the first four of those winning poems here.
KUL, by Fatimah Asghar
Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kul.
A spell cast with the entire
mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. What day am I promised?
Tomorrow means I might have her forever.
Yesterday means I say goodbye, again.
Kul means they are the same.
I know you can bend time.
I am merely asking for what
is mine. Give me my mother for no
other reason than I deserve her.
If yesterday & tomorrow are the same
bring back the grave. Pluck the flower
of my mother’s body from the soil.
Kul means I’m in the crib eyelashes
wet the first time they open. Kul means
my sister is crawling away from her
on the bed as my father comes home
from work. Kul means she’s dancing
at my wedding not-yet-come
kul means she’s oiling my hair
before the first day of school. Kul
means I wake to her strange voice in the kitchen
kul means she’s holding my baby
in her arms, helping me pick a name.
Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, educator and performer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on news outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship recipient and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After came out on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color and the writer of If They Come For Us (One World, August 2018), a collection of poems that explores the legacy of Partition and orphan-hood. Along with Safia Elhillo, she is the editor of Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket 2019), an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender nonconforming and/or trans.
OFFSTAGE, CHRIST, by Kristina Faust
At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.
The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.
That he’d never learn to cook was only one of the regrets that came to him in quiet rooms. He felt an ache at the back of his tongue knowing he would lose the taste of aniseed, say, the way others so easily forgot visions of the world without end and lapsed into dirt sense when merely stirred by a voice, a flame, or the shimmer of oil.
Kristina Faust is a native New Jerseyan living in Grand Rapids, MI. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize for poetry.
BURYING SEEDS, by Ama Codjoe
for Betty Shabazz
Who, when they killed her husband, was carrying
twin girls—not in her arms, but in an armless
sea, with bits of blood as food. She covered
her daughters in the waters of her body.
She covered her daughters in the rooms
her body built, pressed against the wooden
floor of the Audubon Ballroom. She must have
cried, as my mother did, when she stuttered, Twins?
into the paper gown of the hospital room.
The body longs for its double. Even twins
stretch long their arms toward other strangers.
The first time I visited a mosque, I was surprised
to be separated from my father and brothers.
I sat, with the women and girls, alone.
From across the aisle, I stared at the men
longingly. As a child, I asked my preschool teacher
why I couldn’t play outside, shirtless like
the boys. It was a hot day. Before she could answer,
I relented, wearing my favorite undershirt—the one
with Archie, Betty, and Veronica—chasing
my sun-kissed brothers across the playground.
Lately, when I glimpse my nakedness in the half
mirror above the bathroom sink, I’m looking
at the photograph of Pauline Lumumba baring
her breasts as a sign of mourning. The widow’s
breasts and mine hang like four weeping eyes,
without titillation, fertility, or innocence.
I wanted to write a poem for Betty Shabazz
because her high cheekbones and luminous
eyes are like a BaKongo mask breathed
into with life. After her husband’s lifeless
body was wrapped in white linen and covered
by the words: what we place in the ground
is no more now a man—but a seed—she took
one last look at him who had smiled at her
and touched, countless times, her unveiled face.
My mother did not wear a veil on her wedding day.
Eighteen years after their divorce, my father
fidgets with the gold band she slid along his finger.
As she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger,
shimmying the ring over my father’s knuckle,
which words did her mind circle over: worse or better
death or death? That night, did my mother bunch
the hotel bedsheet in one hand like a nosegay?
Did she allow it—another white dress—to drag,
crumpled, behind her? The vows we promise
one another are veils through which we envision
the future; we enact our dreams using a vision
clouded by tulle and lace. Grief-stricken, Betty Shabazz
said of her husband’s assassination, Well, it finally
happened. Weeks prior, she had taken to wearing
her husband’s hat for comfort and continued to do so
after he died. I want a desire that could be mistaken
for grief to cloud my face, to make me shudder, to twist
my mouth into a cry. Once, I shared a bed with a man
who, as a boy, heard his parents’ lovemaking. I was
confused, he admitted, it sounded like they were in pain.
Grief is the bride of every good thing, Betty Shabazz
reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the shape of a waterfall,
which is also the shape of my mother’s dress falling
from her shoulders. Through its fabric, I can see a cloud
turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star—
a star that might be a planet. It’s hard to tell from here,
wrapped in the caul of the present, fixed on this plot
of grass, with so many seeds buried underground,
and winter—forged into a circle—threatening never to end.
Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude, forthcoming in 2022 by Milkweed Press. Among other honors, she has received a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City and works in social justice and the arts.
PROVINCETOWN, by Francisco Márquez
Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack
as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,
not black rock or islands of fog rising individual
in a barrenness of salt. It is not that
it was not beautiful, but that I tried to conjure
its momentous light, eternal
that is inside the ordinary, and couldn’t. If I look
backwards, the mysteries forming themselves
in darkness, I remember
the heaviness of heat.
A soporific wave lifting from concrete.
There was more a strangeness
in the dark square of water lifting
from a mallard having submerged,
like the sun into water, than there was
to that wooden place. But to think of it
in exile, in its solitude of water,
to see it turn significant
against what could destroy it,
it was then I saw myself becoming it.
Francisco Márquez is a poet from Maracaibo, Venezuela, born in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of the MFA program at NYU, and his work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Narrative, and Bennington Review, among other publications. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and The Poetry Project, as well as Letras Latinas and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is assistant web editor at Poets & Writers and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His poem presented here will be reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2021.
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