Sadia Hassan | September 2020

“The speakers in both “Suppositions After the Fire” and “When I am Felled in Memory” are black girls with pressing observations about the world. It’s important for me that these speakers, wrestling with the complicated reverberations of personal tragedies, are able to make sense of the world through revision. In these poems, where grief is one thing and then another, and survival looks different depending on the truth, I hoped to remind myself that we do not have to live up to the superhuman expectations of the world to deserve the tenderness of our own stories.”

—Sadia Hassan

SUPPOSITIONS AFTER THE FIRE

Suppose he was asleep or worse, drunk upstairs
while below, my mother’s hysterical scream
upset the neighbors.

Imagine my father on all fours looking for his glasses,
his medicine, his wife. Imagine her hands at my back,
insistent: your brother, your brother.

Had I been the kind of sister who risked more
for a brother’s life, I would have

disappeared entirely. Instead, I risked living,
endured the meanness of insults

as I dug through burnt bits for what mother wanted
to salvage: photographs, keyboards, filthy ceramic bowls.

In retellings, I say: the branch fell straight through
my brother’s window carrying a flame

and anger flickers across the cracked coal
of my mother’s eyes. I suppose it is one truth
among many.

There were others: we found him, eventually
smoking blunts in the black Crown Vic,
red-faced with laughter, protected from the rain.

WHEN I AM FELLED IN MEMORY

In the Kingdom God made for me,
mornings are a tender wound.
The evenings too. I flinch at finches
calling to their friends from the tops
of branches. I twist and spin
at the mewling of a kitten caught
in the snags of a bush. I have never
heard anything so feeble. I heard you
once, feathered breath from behind
a door and then, hushed feet padding
away. Where is its mother? Around the corner
a pick-up truck vrooooms its engine.
I bolt at the sick panic of possibility.
Night falls and I return with water.
I sit on the curb and cry touched
by a fickle wind. Grief is a trickle.
Grief is a roar.
Beneath its shadow
memory of what I’d forgotten:
We move. We misremember. We move.
We misre-member. We move. We move. We—

(“Suppositions After the Fire” & “When I am Felled in Memory” printed with permission from Sadia Hassan)

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Sadia Hassan is a Somali American writer. Her chapbook, Enumeration, is forthcoming from Akashik Press as part of The New Generation African Poets: Chapbook Set (Saba). Hassan is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Mississippi.