Desert Skin
I remember nothing
except being born
with a name meaning
date palm.
Dust lifts in my blood.
I climbed olive trees,
date trees—
the only thing my parents
ever agreed on
was my name.
This land is my body—
belly dry as hills,
hair a crown of fronds.
Taste the sweetness
my namesake carries.
I lie back,
eyes dark as tilled earth.
We wait together,
eyes closed,
for mercy.
When I open them
beauty scatters
like watermelon seeds.
Night screen-glow:
children who look like me
or once did,
taken,
harvested.
I watch Arabs hunted.
Middle of the night,
Airless under my blanket.
A scorpion tail
pierces my chest.
Phone frozen
in clammy hands.
Their faces are all faces
at checkpoints,
my beloved exterminated.
Watermelon seeds
slide down
my desert skin.
Museums
A quiet museum in the Northwest Territories,
wandering displays of colonialism,
I stop to listen to indigenous music,
headphones synthetic and cool against my ears.
Each display a postcard
of indigenous women,
an awkward netting
of what roams free.
Around me, taxidermy animals
stiff and coarse, sleek movements frozen mid death.
My blood is a riot of borders.
There is no house
for my ancestry,
no land
that can hold.
To know me, men look
in all the wrong places.
I am drumbeat, smoke learning rhythm—
here and not here.
Reach out and I loosen.
My pale self
works in your offices,
hosts your children after school.
In summer,
my warm nut‑brown skin
easier to admire,
easier to take.
In my story,
I turn to smoke,
seep under doors,
where smoke becomes air.
Museums for white women
cinch them into silence—
corsets and shoes so small
pinky toes swell in protest.
Powdered faces under parasols—
presents men give to each other.
I like this museum,
where women are song,
clothing displayed
made for women who move.
My blood is the violence of warring worlds,
my clothes evade detection.
Coal Black Legs
Some had hidden in luggage,
the trunks of cars,
in darkness—
slipping through fields
as if out of the womb.
Belongings abandoned in houses
where mothers and fathers
held them for the last time,
flesh cleaving from flesh.
They clamoured west.
Loved ones left behind
kites cut free from tangled strings.
We boarded a plane in ‘89,
thick with cigarette smoke.
Resigned stewardesses
bent over trays of vodka.
Our parents returned
to the people they had left
mid-sentence.
Coal dust settled on exposed skin,
black as the guilt carried back
in gift‑stuffed suitcases.
No one told me
why immigrants miss home
even when home is
interrogation rooms
and dark brown uniforms.
I read their lips:
Forgive me.
I left you not knowing—
when I could return.
I left you in long bread lineups,
and knew your love
in stale Christmas cookies
arriving opened, inspected.
I held my mother’s hand
against the press of bodies
on overcrowded tramways,
acrid with sweat.
Out the window,
grey buildings and
proud relatives in Western clothing—
neon shirts glowing like bandages
on the discarded.
Tickets Punched in Green
My eyes were never the coveted kind.
My father-in-law once told me
they turned black as a shark’s
when he said men are the head of the household—
as though such stupidity
deserved a sweet, caramel gaze.
My daughters envy my son
his green-marbled eyes.
They carry my mother’s death,
and the price of desire
paid by my Turkish great-grandmother—
fourteen, a village beauty
with her own small hopes,
not that it mattered
when the Ottoman ships arrived
and plucked her like a waiting flower,
scented but unclaimed,
petals destined for a display case.
I don’t know if the general
let her say goodbye.
She went where voiceless women go—
into the homes of men they do not choose.
Green eyes, child-bearing hips:
tickets punched for her voyage.
She gave him two sons.
A good woman.
Obedient.
Green.
Once grown,
they died one after the other,
and my grandmother
was written into the will
like property.
My father was seven,
newly packaged for boarding school,
when the taunting boys revealed
his father succumbed
in an attic.
No one had told him.
I don’t know if his insides rotted then,
but sometimes I smell them
in my own skin.
Green is the rarest eye color.
Tamara Salih is an Arab poet, memoirist, and child and adolescent psychiatrist living on unceded Coast Salish territories. Her work appears in Ink Sweat & Tears, Eunoia Review, Poet in Verse, and MedMic. Her chapbooks The Asymmetrical Smile and Assigned have received editorial recognition from Quillkeepers Press and Anstruther Press.