I Crack an Egg

and out glops my mother, dressed in runny 
yellow, telling me when to palate cleanse 
Arab from the tongue, if I salt too little, 

how to eat like I’m deserving of love. 
I stand in her clammy kingdom,
bandana tight, pan skirling bayth. 

There are daughters dropped at the mosque 
by mothers who bark May Allah guide you 
then screech off. An imam will find them

weeping, say, Heaven lies under the feet 
of your mother, the sin of defying her 
like murder. Beneath my feet, the doomed 

kitchen, tiles that darken where I walk. 
Find a city of mothers circling the block 
to be alone when they cry for our unscathed 

hands. They are reminded of zebra-stretched 
hips, sandpaper palms from pots of old meat. 
In the forge of her skull, a blacksmith hammers 

without rest. She is the cracked egg, yolk cradled 
back and forth between each shell, dragged 
out of her in a slow sway through the years, 

until the clear is gone completely. I address 
my mother like a woman addresses herself, 
bald-faced wa maftooh. There was a time we both 

were eggs, one base, body lobbing like a ball, 
her breath, my breath, her blood a Nile passing 
two borders. I want to go back to that birth, 

choking on placenta, limitless, not yet like 
the cold ghosts before me, regrets floating 
in a white haze over my shoulder. I place stars 

in the toaster—badges I got growing up:
cooking records, sweeping speeds, all smoking.
I keep the star marked bride ذكية. Saying wallah 

with kul nafsi that I’d be a tricky wife, 
a slippery sea urchin, the crafty creature man 
shall never know about. The star for which 

we ran in dusty shib shib to the park behind 
Roosevelt, buried my fox tail in red sand. 
A smart girl can have her way in anything 

if she’s slick enough. I never saw her like that 
before, never have again: a gutter-flood 
of conviction, hijab sailing on a wooden spike, 

cawing until crows came down from the trees.
She muddied my cheeks. Showed me my 
constellation. Taught me codewords and how 

to dance with dark pythons. We were moth-
bitten, in full effect, free as unhinged jaws, 
spin-drifting into clouds that bulged 

with a begging to rain. He might be the head,
but you’re the neck, she said, crouched 
wild and eye level, a booby-trap babe 

carved in moon ripples. That day I learned 
Arab women are dangerous and beautiful 
witches, the smallest vertebrae, schemers 

holding secret control. One night, I’ll run 
back to that park, unbury my high-risk. 
Bedouin women will vine-swing from 

the shadows, swipe me from beneath 
my mother’s feet, spin me as an a3roosa. 
My lashes curled into scythes, henna

drawn on with bone. Their ululated hymns 
to me like what an egg sings when dropped. 
They’ll veil me with a vulture’s beak 

and marry me to Murder. Instead, I’m in 
the kitchen with a burning omelet, 
my mother scouring my hands raw 

with Brillo and stove fire, who whispers 
through the crunch of her eggshell teeth, 
Don’t mistake softness as something owed to you.

---

Threa Almontaser is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press, 2021) selected by Harryette Mullen for the 2020 Walt Whitman Award at The Academy of American Poets, and a finalist for the 2020 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Passages North, Wildness Journal, Ninth Letter, Raleigh Review, Penguin Random House, and elsewhere. She teaches English to immigrants and refugees in Raleigh and is currently at work on her first novel. For more, please visit threawrites.com.