Safia Elhillo

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Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House 2021), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she holds an MFA from The New School, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee (receiving a special mention for the 2016 Pushcart Prize), co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Safia’s work appears in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland. Source

MEN FOLLOW ME

on instagram

 

on twitter

 

home from the subway station

 

through my front door

 

over the years     wait for me to turn eighteen

 

with their eyes

 

with their cars

 

with their children in the backseat

 

in the empty parking lot     the echo of footsteps giving them hundreds of bodies

 

with their tongues out

 

with their teeth shining like flies

 

after i pay my fare & exit their taxi

 

into the bathroom

 

into the elevator

 

maybe even when i die & step away from my mottled body

 

i will look back to see them still          one hand [    ]

the other reaching for my hair

Published:

2017

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Agency

Body & Body Image

Violence & War

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”