Yasmin Mariam Kloth, USA-Egypt
Hand Rolled Wisdom
My grandmother’s grape leaves
are the only ones I’ll eat.
She’ll pull them like tissue paper
from an oily jar, take
her mottled hand to wild leaves
from vines, from trees, a plastic bag
of yellow veins crisp in the sun.
My grandmother’s grape leaves
are made in many parts,
three days,
one night. The night
my mother died, a family friend
made Persian food we ate in silence
in a sterile room. There were no grape leaves,
but Tahdig, rice burned orange
burned turmeric and saffron
burned broken grains on my hospital plate.
My grandmother’s grape leaves
are first washed, cut, dried, leaves
stretched wide on the counter
open mouths
waiting to be stuffed.
My grandmother rolls her grape leaves by hand,
rolls grape leaves while watching Days of our Lives,
rolls grape leaves into thin bodies—
don’t bulge or break.
She tolerates my time
in the kitchen, winces
when I over-, under- stuff, holds
my hands in the way
she held my mother’s that day.
That is to say: Gently.
My grandmother’s grape leaves
are the only ones I’ll eat.
Leaves from vines she picked the day before
wise to rain and time—
and our quiet lives.
Reprinted with permission.
Published in Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation (Kelsay Books, 2022).
Telephone
Something told me to phone
my grandmother
tonight.
She answered and
her voice changed when
she heard my broken French across the line,
her voice warmed like spilled
ice cream on black pavement, ran
downhill into happy tears.
This is my own fault, I know,
for letting time run so long
without calling. Like sand through a sieve,
so careless and forgetful of me.
My mother used to tell me
her childhood stories of
Alexandria, where
tin cans tied by strings
tethered my grandmother
to neighbors across buildings
above the boardwalk
by the sea.
I thought of my voice through a tin can,
through a string above a city,
thought how much in this life
must have changed
in my grandmother’s eyes.
I am aching in this hollow place
that has grown behind my heart.
It’s the size of a home a squirrel
makes in the brush and
as wide as the Mediterranean Sea.
It’s the length of a walk through
knee high grasses and
as gray as a summer sky.
I ache because my daughter is growing,
and time is changing coastlines;
I ache because
nothing is the same, or
as I wanted it to be.
I ache for my grandmother’s memories,
that I may know Alexandria
and her shorelines—
before years of storms
before the telephone
had come.
Reprinted with permission.
Published in Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation (Kelsay Books, 2022).
Yasmin Mariam Kloth’s poetry explores love, loss, place, and space, often at the intersection of her family memories and her Middle Eastern heritage. Yasmin's work has been published in JuxtaProse, the Cathexis Northwest Press, the West Trestle Review, among others. Her poems have previously appeared in the Tiger Moth Review, including “Banyan Song”, which was awarded third place in the 2021 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry. Her debut collection of poetry from Kelsay Books is titled Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation.