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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WAITING  
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Geneffa Hahah

Porter Gulch Review 2024
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_ In Geneffa Jahan's poem "Waiting" the speaker awaits her death as
if it were an abusive lover. _

,

 

in Gaza
there are sisters
who sit

some alone
some together
though they take small comfort
in company

we sit and we wait
one says
on a phone
to a friend
in the West
before lines are lost

wait for our bomb to come
or for the bombs to stop
not knowing for which
they wait

they wait the same way
and wonder if it's
better not to know

for still five times a day
they pray bodies bowed
nose to the ground

as if to practice its final posture
and five times a day
their bodies rise again
as if saved

Alhamduliilah! they call out to each other as if spared to do more
than wait and pray

my bomb she says
the only intimacy left
as she
listens for the one that will claim her

the last thing to ever touch her
the last thing she will ever know    

_Geneffa Jahan published her first collection, "Spilling the Chai:
Poems about Family and Food," in 2024, and finally paid off her burial
plot in Half Moon Bay. She writes about this coincidence in her essay,
"Laid to Rest," which will appear next year in an anthology edited by
OG Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston._

* Gaza
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* war
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