A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Two poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth

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.

জন্ম-মৃত্যু (BIRTH – DEATH)

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