Friendship Snapshot

By Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. Her honors also include Arab American Book Award, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She is the first contemporary Iraqi woman poet translated into English. Her book THE WAR WORKS HARD was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. New Directions publisher three of her other poetry books and her non-fiction book,THE BEEKEEPER, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and for PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. Her debut novel, THE BIRD TATTOO, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is coming out on December 6, 2022 from Pegasus. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan.

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My friend is always busy,

so I made a new friend

of Play-Doh.

She looks lost, but happy.

Her button eyes shine with curiosity.

We sit drinking coffee,

sharing a piece of cake

and joyful little stories

the world doesn’t care about.

She amazes me with her brown pigtails

and playful sense of humor.

But one day when she tries

to tell me something

straight from the green heart

she wears like a brooch,

the words harden like dried clay

and can’t reach me to make

sense of her future absence.

This is just as it happened

with my busy friend.

Once, as we walked by the river,

I tried to remember the dream

in which I saw her coming out

of herself as light,

but I could remember only enough to say

light—light—

while she paused

to snap a photo:

two faces reflected

on the river’s sunlit surface

for an instant…

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