Ode to Gossips
By Safia Elhillo
i was mothered by lonely women some
of them wives some of them with
plumes of smoke for husbands all lonely
smelling of onions & milk all mothers
some of them to children some to old names
phantom girls acting out a life only half
a life away instead copper kitchenware
bangles pushed up the arm fingernails rusted
with henna kneading raw meat with salt
with coriander sweating upper lip
in the steam weak tea hair unwound
against the nape my deities each one
sandal slapping against stone heel sandal-
wood & oud bright chiffon spun
about each head coffee in the dowry china
butter biscuits on a painted plate crumbs
suspended in eggshell demitasse & they
begin i heard people are saying
i saw it with my own eyes [ ]'s daughter
a scandal she was wearing [ ]
& not wearing [ ] can you imagine
a shame a shame
Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; Girls That Never Die (One World, 2022), featured on the Indie Bestseller list the week of September 7, 2022; and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me a World, 2021), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a California Book Award and an Author Honor from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards. With Fatimah Asghar, she is coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
She has received support as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and a Cave Canem Fellow. She won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was listed in Forbes Africa's 2018 30 Under 30. Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour, Ilia, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. She lives in Los Angeles.
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