THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH ON EUCLID DOESN’T SELL LEMONADE ANYMORE
I take the mosh pit, lime
Juuls on hardwood, the nice
smelling white girls wearing
hoops just big enough
to be questionable, tired
metaphor of me limericking
your belt loops. you speak
like the halted development
on Madison & a kidney
is just an organ
with an important job. in catechism
they told us Saint Barbara
fled her steeple, read
all the forbidden books. the luxury
towers on Park shimmer. we
were told this was revolutionary –
a girl cornering God
in a cramped room,
availing herself of him
in the dark. we watch
cranes smear the horizon &
a jellyfish, even when determined,
is really just a blot of ink. I was
raised to love resurrected things
& the junior college across the street
is full of juiceboxes, blue
pens, puritan dreaming. like opium,
you smile for no reason. like homily,
I sing for us both.
MEMORY IS A SOFTWARE
| func(fraction) | your grandmother is a quarter Armenian & your father once denied he was from Trablos. we are not really “Arab.” who is really “from” |
| func(weight) | I was always a skinny girl ÷ we fry yolks on pavement |
| func(loop) | desire is an old family heirloom none of the women in my wall approximately jacarandas on my dress |
| func(autopsy) | my mother in her emerald swimsuit |
| func(anaphora) | clothes are about waiting growing into the jacket coat sweats |
| func(Thomas) | jiddo the numismatist & me quarter the girl I should be ÷ I make odalisques in the mirror I cover my face in yolk |
| func(fraction) | I am an approximation of jacarandas |
| func() | clothes are about waiting my baptism name is Maryam |
| func(sacrament) | the priest wrings the solar system from my mouth |
Maya Salameh is a poet fellow of the William Male Foundation and a 2016 National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. She is the winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Prize, through which her debut poetry collection, HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE, will be published in 2022. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Rumpus, and Asian American Writer’s Workshop, among others. Maya is the author of rooh (Paper Nautilus Press 2020).
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