Safia Elhillo

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

ODE TO MY HOME GIRLS

smelling of orange rind of cardamom

most beautiful girls in the world wake up [ ]

we're getting waffles you can keep crying

but you're going out my marriages

my alibis my bright & hardy stalks

of protea & all i know of love i learned

at thirteen dialing basma's home phone

by heart to three-way call whatever boy

so that weeks later when the phone bill came

only basma's familiar number beside the time stamp

clearing my name basma herself staying awake

for hours to hang up the phone after

you who send pictures of your rashes

to the group text & long voice notes

from the bathtub your laughter echoing against the tiles

you who scatter the world's map piling into

cheap buses & budget airlines four of us asleep

in my dorm bed six of us overflowing

my studio apartment false lashes for weeks after

like commas in my every pillowcase you clog my toilet

& admit it you text me screenshots

from the gucci fashion show getting rich

so i can get u this & when i lived alone

& that man followed me

one night home from the six train

up lexington & into the hallway

tried for hours to break open my front door

you took turns from all your cities & stayed

overnight with me on the phone for three days

snoring & murmuring in your sleep

Published:

2020

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Friendship

Love & Relationships

Memory & The Past