ruh

After Fatimah Asghar

in my mother’s first language,
ruh means both breath

and word. how thoughts start
and finish. ruh means the softest

opening of lip. ripple of tongue.
means beginnings and ends feel

the same in my mother’s throat.
means she believes we move only

in circles. mouths folding into
themselves. vowels shaped like breaths.

shaped like prayers. means when
the white man at trader joes tells

her shut the fuck up, shaking his red
fist, my mother flounders. clenches

her throat. lips pressed like the bud
of a flower. starves herself

of both air and story. My mother
squeezes ruh because when her body

trembles all that is left: the shadow
of a sticky-shored homeland

all that is left: the mouth she
was born from.

First published by The Poetry Society for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2020: www.foyleyoungpoets.org. Republished with permission.

Sarah Fathima Mohammed is a brown, Muslim-American emerging writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is fascinated with poetry as a means of fostering empowerment and awareness for her immigrant Muslim community. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and the National Poetry Quarterly’s Editors’ Choice Prize, among others. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Canvas Literary Journal, Rattle, Blue Marble Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Apprentice Writer, and elsewhere. When she is not writing, she serves as managing editor for The Aurora Review and reads for Polyphony Lit.