Poem-a-Day - "Amsterdam" by Safia Elhillo

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May 8, 2023

Amsterdam

Safia Elhillo

^{after Jenny Xie}

Concentric ripple of the canals, little apartment
at the center point. All June I’ve been in Amsterdam,
vowels softening to liquid in my mouth. Long walks
over the cobblestones in the warmest part
of the afternoon, narrow houses along the water arranged
like crooked teeth. My steps lead me over a ballet
of bridges, precarious choreography of bicycles
and other bodies, the rare car vulgar and roaring
along the too-small street. I count the faces around
that could be my faces, features and shades
from a much older world than this. City I may never
see again, and still my old need to belong. To daughter
the possibly Sudanese man at the Chipsy King,
his kind assurance that the dish contains no pork.
My nails soften and split in the cool dry air. An ashen
gray patch on my calf and I am ashamed for hours after,
wetting a finger with saliva to correct it.

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“I wrote this poem during a month-long residency in Amsterdam during which I attempted a 30/30 (thirty poems in thirty days) with my friend Hala Alyan. It’s written after Jenny Xie’s poem ‘Corfu,’ which is one of my all-time favorite travel poems. So much of my writing practice during that month involved going on long walks and describing to myself what I was noticing, what I was feeling, retraining my poet’s eye to the present day after a long obsession with history, with all my life’s great ruptures. In this poem, the worst thing that happens is that I was, briefly, ashy. And that was as deserving of poetry as anything else that’s happened.”
—Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo is a Sudanese American poet and the author of Bright Red Fruit, forthcoming this year from Make Me a World. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles.

Girls That Never Die
(One World, 2022)

“Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City” by Jennifer Grotz
read more

“Amsterdam” by Megan Fernandes
read more

Thanks to Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Nguyen’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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