Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Children splash
in waters blue-green like
a sky that has been
accosted by the sunset
of a green star
fleeting colors and waves
nile lily
invasive species
I forget where I’m from.
My grandmother shows me catfish
caught from a stream
branch of a delta tree
child of the nile
brown hands like ripples
of a pebble dropped in stillness
to find Soloman’s ring
in the belly
of a great big fish
to feed us.
They are building
a New Nile
its currents borrowed off the backs
of people wrist-deep and knee-deep
in wades of mud the color of
our skin.
Arguments over who
owns the Nile™
not knowing my grandmother
washes her bangles
in the murky river
and my aunts
dipped their feet
after a day baking
as the river bed does too
and I took my first breath
of sea breeze on its shores
the day I learned the word
bahr
meant more than I could ever know.
They celebrate a queen
whose skin did not glisten
with the sand coating the bottom
of a river, arms split in two,
the Embracer,
whose tongue did not taste
the words dug from the depths
em bou still uttered
for the baby
searching for water.
My mother in america
hears calls of
“Cleopatra!”
she scoffs
vines creeping from her throat
to wrap around me.
“Queen of the Nile, I may be,
but do they not know
Cleopatra was Greek?”

I am not her.

A note on non-English words: bahr in Arabic means “sea,” but people in rural Egypt use it to refer to the Nile. em bou is a remnant of the Ancient Egyptian phrase, literally meaning “want water,” [eb mou] and Egyptians teach it to babies so they indicate that they’re thirsty.