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Love Poem with Dreams and War Stories
by Dana Alsamsam


​Beside me      you sleep simply      with the deep of deathbeds
vacant-minded      while I lie awake       our life
ballooning in my chest cavity      All day we nurse
a sweet garland of joy      you won’t eat the last bite
unless I feed it to you       won’t tell me where your mind wanders
but I hear the warplanes      I hear the vast unfolding     
the flames       the fist       the hatchet       the sun     
the sun       the contrary sun      Sometimes there is too much
to tell you when you wake      the words shuffle      but do not
articulate       In Arabic lovers say      ya’aburnee      you bury me
My love      you bury me next to eight hundred of your dearest
hatchets      your anger blooming from the ground
like maple blossoms      ya’aburnee      my love      you conquer
and crown me      convince me the luxury of ruin      until
pins of sunshine fall brightly into my palms      It’s bittersweet     
isn’t it      the wound is the place the light enters you      So in dreams
I enter you from all sides      So in dreams
we are full with light

Picture
 Dana Alsamsam is a first generation Syrian-American from Chicago and is currently based in Boston where she works in arts development. A Lambda Literary fellow, she received her MFA in Poetry from Emerson College where she was the Editor-in-Chief of Redivider and Senior Editorial Assistant at Ploughshares. She is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, The Offing, Tinderbox, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common and others. 

Spring 2020
ISSN 2157-8079
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