Three Poems

PHOTO: ANDREW MAGILL/FLICKR poetry Three Poems by Nazem Elsayed The Blind Thread If only I were the rubbing of shoulders in crowded places, the sympathetic applause, the neck that turns to change the view and move a life. If only I were the enthusiastic care-free chatter of people coming out of a movie theater. If only I had the contentment of floor tiles with contiguity or the look that does not know what it sees now that it has completely lost its connection to the eye. If only I were a blind thread guided forward by the needle. One of My Brothers One of my brothers likes collecting tools and scraps: screwdrivers clutches bolts nuts and nails that are like vertical glances. He collects them all, telling himself: ruin is possible at any moment. The Family Album How you grew from page to page in the family album crying under the gaze of the mother hidden somewhere outside the frame. Naïve among sisters, chubby among classmates, and while everyone else stood up, early you discovered convincing reasons to remain seated. With your eyes widened by the outside, you began to look for ways to escape this body. In the album that abbreviates a life in thirty pages, only calls of distress loom vague and mute from one photograph and the other. The viewer fails to imagine an appropriate voice for every photo. Translations from the Arabic By Huda Fakhreddine Nazem Elsayed is a Lebanese prose poet born in 1975. He has published four collections of poetry, and his work is included in several anthologies. He is one of the thirty-nine Arab writers under forty selected for the UNESCOsponsored anthology Beirut 39. He is currently based in the Washington, DC, area Huda Fakhreddine is an assistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (2015) and co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (2017). WORLDLIT.ORG 13

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