by Sara Elkamel
There is a black and white portrait of my grandparents on their wedding day framed with a red velvet trim in the small house of my childhood, where my grandmother taught me to pray. She’d stuff my head in one of her many prayer scarves, which held me like a tent. I’d bend and bow and whisper the way she whispered—each of us speaking to God like we knew Him. Near the end, her index finger fluttered frantically off her right knee as she murmured: I witness… I witness… We turned our necks from side to side, chins digging into each shoulder like a pillow as we whispered goodbye to the angels.
*
Every winter, my aunt gets ten kilos of red carrots delivered to her door, which she crushes and softens to make a viscous, crimson jam. Her secret ingredient is ground cloves. The first time she gave me a jar, it was nearing summer, my grandfather had just died. When I pulled it out of the fridge it was months later; I could think of nothing else to eat. Discovering small blue circles unblinking on the surface, I closed my eyes and ate it anyway.
*
As a child, I’d escape into the kitchen and watch my grandmother finger through a large dish of uncooked rice for small stones. She always complained I never said much, never took the peeled oranges she offered. I always was a quiet animal. I was happiest when she put me in a chair and gave me a toasted slice of feteer, which I hid beneath a small hill of powdered sugar. She’d go back to reading the rice; I’d watch her hands and say nothing as I ate.
*
It was only when I got older my grandmother told me their wedding portrait was taken years after they’d been married, when they finally had enough saved for a studio. By then they’d had my aunt, who crawled and hid beneath the puff of her mother’s white skirt. It was too early to imagine anyone’s room in the dirt. They looked straight into the box camera, and they did not hold hands.
*
There are photographs of my grandparents on every beach in the country, in Mecca, outside the Valley of the Kings, by the High Dam in the south. After they buried their son, my grandmother signed them up for every possible trip. There is one of them on the North Coast, my grandfather’s moustache graying, his belly circular and wet. In the photo, my grandmother is watching the Mediterranean turn emerald, a large straw hat deflecting the sun.
*
Last summer when I visited for rice pudding and broth, I told her I’ve been waking up scared. In my dreams I swallow stones that sift all the way to my toes. After asking if I also see any blood, she told me she has given up reading dreams.
*
When she moved to a different room to pray, I slipped out to the balcony for a smoke. Resting on the railing, I spotted a ceramic dish with a mountain of powdered sugar, ants circling to the peak like pilgrims, nesting in the grooves. The reddening air was holding the echoes of prayers like newborns. When I asked her why there was a plate of sugar on the balcony—her head still peeking through the tent—she said, What were you doing on the balcony?
*
The way I remember it, light stippled the spot on the Persian carpet where, in prostration, our fingers would touch—maybe it didn’t.
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator currently based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, MQR, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets ’20 & ’22, Best of the Net ’20, among others. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).