Dana Alsamsam
Dana Alsamsam is a queer, Syrian-American poet from Chicago and an MFA candidate at Emerson College. Dana's chapbook (in)habit is now available from tenderness, yea press and her poems are published or forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Poetry East, Hobart, DIALOGIST, The Collapsar, Blood Orange Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Fugue, BOOTH and others.
On Thanksgiving my family mourns the empty seat
It’s not death that fills it it’s mother a word becoming
so artificial to me it smells of pink latex not fennel not oak
How can someone be so not here so loudly her empty seat
reupholsters itself with a fish bowl an animal hunger a destructive
want we all have looking at it Carcass on all the plates surrounding me
I become carnal I go for her monster the small orange unpeeled
fish in the bowl I take it into my mouth let slimy settle then swallow
Stomach acid turns neon and this is the only way she will ever live
inside of me We say our prayer we break her glass bowl like a ritual
like a Greek wedding altar like water breaking a woman’s womb
standing up and sudden I emerge from her unwhole she
emerges from me cold and still writhing My father’s knife twitches
in the direction of her total breakage We all flow into and out of
her absence we all ignore glass on the floor we all eat until we feel
not here not here not here like she is screaming devoured