Sara Elkamel
Poetry
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator 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, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and Best New Poets, among other publications. Elkamel was awarded the Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2022 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).
Renovation
I am six or seven, and my father is saying it is okay for us to spray our palms blue and print them on the walls. In fact, he encourages it. It is a matter of days before the house is re-painted the new color of our childhood; a muted salmon, like the inside of something. I punch a seahorse stamp into the same sallow wall until the turquoise ink is dry. Dina and I are racing up and down the narrow corridors screaming; briefly, our house is an ocean. My mother is making her thick Friday fries when out of the blue the oil hisses and soars, leaving a burn on her forearm the shape of a neon tetra. The fish paled until one day, it vanished. It was years after my mother left when I saw the fish again, pulsing behind the thinning membrane of my bedroom. When all these walls fade to glass, hundreds of turquoise fish will idle across, the four of us among them. Our house was always turning into an aquarium.