Have You Seen This Word?

By Asma Al-Masyabi

This poem explores the mystery of lost words and where one must go to find them.

i.

I have lost

[                        ]

on many occasions. Sunny days

when nothing seems amiss,

and I am just a little hungry.

Or winter ones,

                              falling

                                    	away

with hollowed longing.

I rarely misplace

  رومان
ru’maan.

Sometimes one

helps find the other.

As if searching

for a missing person, I recite to my sister

its picture,

red-stained fingers     reaching

for bitter tissue

our father’s hands, rounded,

carved jewels between teeth.  

I let the curve

     ر                                               
of ra      linger                between us.

Pomegranate     Have you seen this word?   	Sometimes

it is she who asks me. Sometimes

we must figure it out together.

We often lose things

easily retrievable.

 
ii.

Suddenly,

I remember

I have forgotten.

The edges are blurred and though

I feel its outline

on my tongue, I cannot taste it.

[            	        	]

Cutting cucumbers,

I slice them lengthwise,

                    once,         	twice,          into wedges. I reach

for fragments—

                                       ص                                                                      	            ا          ع                                        	
recall its sharp s sound, sa’d, the lengthy 	     	yawn 	           	of ‘ayn and alif.

  د
Dal   resurfaces.

I play anagrams

with echoes of letters, stumble upon

                             	       	a name,           	a bowl,            	

                                                                              happiness. I pierce

the thin flesh of a tomato,

                    dice it into three,   	then four,       	then four,

then—
                           	         	My knife poses

                                                       above lettuce leaves. The blade

slips into green and I snag on

       		صداع
  	     	Su’daa—

                                                      headache.

I wonder

why words 

escape, chew cucumbers

in silence. 

Performance

Process

This poem began just as my mentor Kaci and I delved into the world of prose poetry. After we read Vahni Capildeo’s excerpt in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem where she describes the sensation of losing the words for “wall” and “floor,” Kaci prompted me to write a poem where I “lost” one to two words of my own vocabulary.

As I typed out the early draft of this poem, I found that responding to this prompt came easily to me. Being bilingual, or perhaps just being me, I lose words as if I have a small hole in my pocket they always manage to slip out of. Usually, they’re words that don’t quite matter, but still sit in the back of my mind, pleading to be remembered. Like the three phrases for “please” I know in Arabic, or types of clouds—except for, strangely, cirrus.

Because we began by studying prose poetry, this poem started out as a paragraph of text. Luckily, though, Kaci encouraged me to take it a step further as we dove into learning about line breaks. As soon as I began to restructure the poem, I knew this was the perfect format for the piece. I loved the way the lines took up so much space, begging the reader to consider each one more carefully, instructing them, almost, as to where to pause and how to read it. After that, it took a few more drafts, and heavy consideration of each word and line, before Kaci and I decided the poem had found the best version of itself.

Although I regularly write poetry, this poem tested and expanded the limits to what I believed I could do. I was fairly new to trying out more experimental line breaks, but I quickly fell in love with them in the process of writing and editing this poem. Bilingual poetry, too, is something I haven’t attempted before this poem—I have Kaci to thank for introducing it to me and encouraging me to try it for myself.