ninkarrak
My lover showed me the dawn. She showed me
the sunrise & the shape of the moon. I lit the sky
alive with morning praise. I sewed her pants carefully,
stretched my lizard body on the patio, and finally began the day.
*ninkarrak: Sumerian goddess of healing herbs. “The Lady who makes the broken up whole again.” Given the incantation bēlet balāti “Lady of Health.” She also the queen of rage who can make the earth quake.
ishtar remembers
bull, serpent, star & alien
annunaki, the wrath of
a great flood. a crack
in the underworld &
all hell is ripped
loose, the creatures who
lived in the caves
spat venom & conquered
the mountains again
& we
like a raging river like
a fleeing family on
the verge of an impossible
future we sung & rewound
what was not meant to
jump out, but the monsters
were already around us, such
lovely & dangerous beings.
we let go the gold, put
down our things, ululated
from the underground prisons,
at the holy festivals, under
the vast & velvet blanket
of night & we remembered
the voices without sounds
the holy spirits inside the ground
& for you we brought the
stars back down
*ishtar: Ishtar is the nonbinary Assyro-Babylonian goddess of love and war. Zhe enforced divine justice and descended as a fiery star upon the earth. In Assurbanipal’s Hymn to Ishtar of Nineveh, they write “Like Assur, she wears a beard and is clothed in brilliance.”
BANAH AL-GHADBANAH is a Syrian mermaid raised in the u.s. south. Zhe is the winner of the Diverse Voices Prize 2021 and zir first poetry collection, we are on this earth to be free, will be published in 2022 (Dzanc Books). Zhe holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies and looks at how Syrian women use creativity in the Syrian Revolution. You can find zir writing in Mizna, Poetry Northwest, the forthcoming anthology dream of the river (Jacar Press), Afghan Punk Magazine, 3asal mag, and scattered across the internet in pen names on other sites.