Jessica Abughattas
Jessica Abughattas was born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection, Strip (University of Arkansas Press), won the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, “Strip is a captivating debut about desire and dispossession, and that tireless poetic metaphor, the body. Audacious and clear-eyed, plainspoken and brassy, these are songs that break free from confinement,” the series editors said. She is a Kundiman fellow and a graduate of the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing program. Her poetry has won Best of the Net and appeared in Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, and Redivider, among other places. Source
Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Arab Girl
1.
She doesn't read
The Atlantic
nor does she orgasm.
2.
Dancing, sucking her belly toward her spine.
Black vines
sway to the mumble of a lute,
descend the trellis of her,
sweep bare feet.
3.
Princess Jasmine
Gigi Hadid
Shakira
Sabah
4.
Have you seen the brown-necked raven
who builds a home inside a bomb shelter?
The laughing dove who nests in olive trees?
5.
I am given the name of an American cheerleader; I am
fearfully made.
6.
almond eyes & thighs
& rug-burned knees
7.
I don't know which I prefer:
to be a child in my father's house
a servant in my husband's
or liberated by a
fashion
magazine?
8.
Salma Hayek
George Clooneyswifey
Fairouz
A Pole-Dancing Muslim Miss USA
9.
Carrying a basket into a field
disappearing parcel by parcel.
She mourns groves of desire.
10.
She dies
like an American in the street or some Mesopotamian desert
at midnight in the afternoon.
11.
The bulbul also sings.
12.
Someday my name will sound like Olds,
will sound like Plath.
Someday, in my father's Spanish inflection,
will sound like Abughattàs.
13.created by God
to fuck,
to serve
coffee and tea.
Published:
2017
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2022
Themes:
Identity
Poetic Form
Racial Injustice
Womanhood
Literary Devices:
After Poems
A poem where the form, theme, subject, style, or line(s) is inspired by the work another poet.
Allusion
an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference
Enjambment
a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered
Sarcasm
the use of irony to mock or convey contempt
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”