National Poetry Month Day 10: Nathalie Handal

 

 

 

American Love Story in Rome

I had a dream I left the other side
of myself in New York City,
I have to go back to get it
but I can’t move. I wonder
if I shut the windows, left flowers
to wilt, left food to decay, left my
heart on the Queensboro Bridge.
I feel my mind blow open.
I run to the Tiber, chasing chaos
the way a heart does after its broken,
seeing my favorite song sinking
the way the dying does for days.
I don’t know what it all means.
Maybe that’s how the world walks into us,
with worry. Or maybe that’s how it goes,
like a boat coming from the future
to take us away.

 

 

***
Author photo by Andrea Salerno

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Nathalie Handal is the author of 10 award-winning books, most recently, Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award, and The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, and the Africa Institute, among others. She is professor at New York University, and writes the column, “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders.

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