{"id":1370,"date":"2019-12-05T11:22:21","date_gmt":"2019-12-05T17:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=1370"},"modified":"2023-02-15T19:12:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T01:12:44","slug":"poetry-by-ruth-awad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1370","title":{"rendered":"Poetry by Ruth Awad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"single-box clearfix entry-content\" itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div class=\"poemscroll\" style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">\n<h4>Learning Arabic<\/h4>\n<pre style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">Suspended in\nthe T\u00e9l\u00e9ph\u00e9rique\nabove Harissa,\nI see our salt-white\nlady reach for Beirut.\nLanguage is both\nthe cedar shade\nand mountain road,\nthe bay licking the heels\nof Jounieh. My auntie\nteaches me the Arabic\nword for <em>cat<\/em>. My\nAmerican tongue\nand bare legs\nsay I\u2019m Lebanese\nonly in blood.\nShe wants me\nto learn.\nIf not for cables,\nwe would drop\nto our deaths.\nIf not for our blood,\nwe\u2019d be untethered.\nWhat saves us\nis the one\nsmall thing:\na cable,\na call to prayer,\na new word\nstrung like a pearl\nin the mouth\nof a girl.\n\n<\/pre>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>After the Argument<\/h4>\n<pre style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">We blur into shapes, our bodies\nlike a question we keep asking each other.\nMy wings fold down my back, slighted.\nI know somewhere in my chiseled heart\nI am vicious and unlovable, that you\nsee me circling from an overpass and say:\n<em>Look at the bird that only eats the dead.<\/em>\nI dreamt of a tunnel dark as a feather.\nOur bed heavy with the dream, I woke\nyou with my crying. I slip her name\ninto my beak and fly off.\n\n\f\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr>\n<hr>\n<p>Ruth Awad is the Lebanese-American author of <em>Set to Music a Wildfire<\/em> (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in<em> Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal,<\/em> and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Learning Arabic | After the Argument<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1330,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[69],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}