Mediterranean Sea Salt
by Dina El Dessouky
Good witches
would toss you over their shoulders,
lay you
in sacred circles around their gathered kin.
Unknown cousins,
burnt by our every exhale,
we owe you that much.
In our wounds
you pool thicker than blood;
now, even coffee
tastes more like rust
than cardamom.
Now, only the craftiest of
women can breathe
life back into you,
our arms too weak
to haul you ashore.
We have confined you to
kitchen counters,
harvested you
to cradle in our lungs
ancient lakes we lost too soon
to the Haboob and the Harmattan.
We have heaped you
on our plates,
turned our bodies into reluctant urns,
ectopic with white ash,
to remind ourselves
we too were once
tiny grains that the
faulty sediment
shook loose and percolated.
But we sweat you
over breakfast:
Bless this food,
a carbon copy
of our folks
and footprints.
Bless this food
and each hand that gathered it.
Bless this food.
Our sweat beads at midday
under impermeable cobalt tracksuits,
heeding calls to prayer on-the-run,
and even after waterfall ablutions
we sweat you,
can’t keep you from seeping
back through our pores.
We sweat you in fellaheen robes,
blue-hot rock steam exploding our lungs
and pulling seared foreheads
towards the cool balm of earth.
We sweat you safe on your journey.
We sweat you home, cousins.
About Dina El Dessouky
Dina El Dessouky was born in Hamburg to Egyptian parents from Cairo and immigrated to the United States at age three. El Dessouky teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her doctorate in literature. Her work has appeared in Mizna, Spiral Orb, Anomaly Literary Journal, and Min Fami: Arab Feminist Reflections on Identity, Space & Resistance (Inanna Publications, 2014). She is an alum of VONA/Voices, The Quest Writer’s Conference, and Las Dos Brujas Writer’s Workshops, and has served as a resident writer in the Santa Cruz Recycled Art Program. Her poetry chapbook, “From the Zabbala’s Cart” is part of New-
Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Sita) (Akashic Books, 2019).