sitting on 
sandy beach
toes dipped over 
freshwater’s cold edge

sandal lines
on her so-tan feet
sunning herself asleep

                                                                                    she carries her 
poems like figs  

shaken from the tree 
of knowledge or heartbreak 

or picked from a window
in Lebanon

calling them figs
does not describe her harvest 

or her for that matter
it does not tell you 

how important she is to me
or everything i haven’t said

she is still on the beach
she is always 

up shore from me
almost close enough to witness her
barefoot markings falter mid-sand 

i will follow her faded trail
she is still astray
from safety and from land 

into water
it starts waist deep and drops
off quick she holds 
her breath 

i am worried for us 
the hourglass is stagnant 
is sideways

i can’t recall
our childhood
all on my own i can’t
remember when 

we became sisters
embracing in mom’s blue robe 
or when she first held up my head

sometimes i worry
that the next time we meet 

we will no longer know
each other she 

will dream in idioms
that i don’t understand 

or she will not
understand why my fire 

has never
burned as fiercely as hers

there is always the hope
that we can hold out 

our harvest to each other
we will see and savor 

everything we need to
though this would mean 

that i would have
to pluck more than 

one fig
a year

photographs are not sufficient
to tell her story 

i know she loved me eventually
but love was after worry that
i’d be better loved than her

snapshot of two kids
piled up on a paisley couch
with mom euphoric

there are parts of her
that i will never know 

or if i did know
they would not mean
what they should 

she has outlived
what i wish i could
take away from her

what hurts most
was left unresolved 

there will always be 
this fig

sitting in my
stomach rot

undissolving
she is not to blame

i am not to blame 
too

if she can read this 
she is haunting my hands

trying to talk
or type in Times to what
she was i am

sorry if i’m wrong
it’s been so long since we last laughed together
was it February

when we
facetimed four years ago

it was
her smile that made me cry

i would
if that wouldn’t take away
her fire 

which is something
i could never do 

i only hope that her harvest
will not become like 

dead birds
swollen 

with guilt
and decomposition

i hope that it will remain
like figs to her
nourishing if small 

and beautiful despite
the heat of the sun
i hope that she will grow 

like the fig trees
that live in her 

through cracks
in the Earth’s rind

i sobbed over 
the color green this morning

olive bikini
at the bottom of her plastic tub 

of summer clothes
that looked better on her
than me

she always knew how to
dress me

how to braid my
hair like i braid 

her words 
like we still speak

ξ

Danielle Badra's poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly (forthcoming), Mizna, Cincinnati Review, Duende, Bad Pony, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Split This Rock, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press in October 2021.