Poetry by Siham Karami

One Night Stand


It started so matter-of-fact in the kitchen.
We drank tea in a 2D conversation,
how he ate leftovers for breakfast,
preferred oolong to jasmine.

Our eyes a whirl of atoms, breaking symmetry,
primordial strings reformulating.
I'm sure he never figured out why
his body filled itself with she-ness,

or why he suddenly turned, man incarnate
namelessly emptying he-ness into the aura,
beings morphed into one energy,
no thoughts but fucking thoughts,

no feelings but a halo of emptied selves,
nothing to hold but this turgid tide
washing over, disembodied, being
nothing, saying nothing, knowing nothing

but the heave and crash on a shoreline
strewn with imagined moonlight,
our two silences parked
as we lost the whole night to a standstill.


​

Salvaging Our Beached Wonderland

The sands stretch on like an endless bed for someone else.
We argue about everything, even breathing. Always doing things the wrong way.
Ripples in the tides,
Our eyes search for something other than each other.
Being presences for one another, it is enough, we look beyond.
The tides flow in and out.
We only concur on the moon, the need to watch it. Another presence.

Nothing was ever easy. We both asked for harder roads, and got them:
Each other. Who could be more difficult?
My constant talking. Your going on and on.
We accuse each other of lectures.
Days pass and the time refuses to let up, give us a booster shot.
Yet small kindnesses, barely noticed--
running into each other in our ornery way,
my turning you over in the bed as you complain,
you enduring frequent wakings alone and uncomfortable to let me sleep--
take the wind out of old storms, their rage
exposed as a random dust
devil spinning out excess.
We almost turned into moderates,
except those piercing words,
deadly and on-target,
breaking our hearts all over again.
And that strange waking,
waves pulling us back --
believing these familiar eyes,
their hope and terror
an ocean.

​

Siham Karami’s full-length poetry collection is To Love the River (Kelsay Books 2018). Her work can also be found in various journals , including Able Muse, Literary Mama, The Rumpus, Off the Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, Otoliths, Mohave He(art), Peacock Journal, and many others. Nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.com