(FIG)

Ahmad Almallah

I
And the worst was discovering the fig trees in the city—their leaves die and dry at first contact with the cold. I pass the one that was first pointed out to me. There is no trunk to this tree, it’s all bare branches now. In summer it never looked like a tree either. More like a bush it was. Some heaviness in the air always pushing it down, never allowing it to extend to the sky like the fig it’s supposed to be. The one stuck in memory. I never dared taste its fruit. I picked them from the branch a couple of times and watched their milk ooze out from the stem. And when touched, the milk didn’t seem thick enough and that was that: only an image you keep in mind, and in the fall only this bare trunk that used to hold the only thing that gave it away: its miracle of leaves.

II
The old world and the Americas are straying apart at a rate of two centimeters per year, and Home is getting farther away from where I left it, and I am, despite my thread of longing, getting ahead of myself.

III
I hold the moment to a mirror. I lose focus or increase it to some point—and when I lose it completely, I am… after all, a vase of stale air.

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Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine and an artist-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania. His newest poetry collection is Wrong Winds (Fonograf Editions, 2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions, 2023) and Bitter English (University of Chicago Press, 2019). He won the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for creative writing and the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. His poems have been published in Jacket2, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cordite, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other publications.

PUBLISHER

Border Wisdom
Winter Editions

Brooklyn, New York

  • Featured book

In his second book of poems, Ahmad Almallah seeks a language that captures the afterlives of the mother tongue. This collection blurs the borders between languages, between the living and the dead, between presence and absence.

The poems of Border Wisdom break and mourn physical borders at the same time. Here the exilic idea of a return to a home is expressed in the daily return to the blank page in search of a poem. In these returns the body brushes against the past and, as Hart Crane puts it, taps into “that memory all things nurse.”

In Border Wisdom, Ahmad Almallah takes the notable step of writing in a mix of Arabic and English scripts, a bilingual poetics that has surfaced intermittently among the finest of our experimental writers. For this and for his exemplary writings in standalone English, I would extend to him the well-known welcome that Emerson directed to Whitman nearly two centuries ago: I greet you at the beginning of a great career.
—Jerome Rothenberg

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