Masters and Lovers

They say Scheherazade saved all women with storytelling

I can’t even save myself before sunrise

I feel like I’m down
there with him
pushing against
what hurts most

He shows me around his house
where a woman set herself on fire
and the walls remained unharmed

Here the ghosts slowly drag me
here the ashes mix with dust

with the smile of       a wolf-grandma
he pretends not to        hear her silence

“I thought you                 like it that way,”
he tells Scheherazade,              gives her children,


spreads across time,                his specters in the world.

Copyright © 2023 by Mona Kareem. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I feel troubled with the way Scheherazade is reclaimed as a feminist figure—a woman who saves other women with storytelling, a woman who negotiates with patriarchy and overcomes it. I wrote this poem to express exhaustion with superheroes, with survival, especially when it’s wrapped in romance. Here we see Scheherazade experiencing fatigue and collapse, spread on a bed, a canvas of pain, a map conquered. The poem is her body, violated in the intimacy and quietness of slow short moments.”
—Mona Kareem