Table
Table, where are
Your hands?
Your face, your eyes
Your mind?
You turned this log
Into a leg
Abandoned other
Steps
And now you sit or
Stand—
Beside yourself,
an edifice of
lifelessness.
And like the figure of speech
You wait—
Or is it us—murderous
Ones
That wait to see you turned.
Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). He is an artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn. His poems appeared in Poetry, SAND, APR,MQR, Icarus among others. Some of his honors include: a fellowship and residency at Millay Arts, the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his work in Arabic has appeared in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. His English works have been translated into Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Telugu. He is currently Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.