by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North, Senior Editor
“In the Bathroom” by Raafat Hekmat, translated by Zyad Altaghlbi, and “A Timeline of Exile” by Maryam Ala Amjadi appear in “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets,” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem. Read the whole folio in the July/August 2026 issue of Poetry.
Note: These poems are not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read them.
A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now.
Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem, who curated this folio, wrote in their introduction that each of the ten contemporary poets has “faced persecution, war, or genocide, as well as threats to their safety because of their writing.” In both poems, we visit the private places that these experiences burrow into the body and soul.
The lines in “A Timeline of Exile” wind and spill as the bloodline does. That first stanza brings everything in it to a “a single trembling point”—a question mark, line break, and stanza break simultaneously. How much more could a line tremble with what it holds and holds up? Later, we face that question, at least in part: What is the difference between red versus black and white lines? The poem posits this by noting both, but doesn’t quite ask or answer it. The ‘point’ is where everything starts: The red lines are crossed, whereas the words ‘border,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ imply impervious binaries and blockages. A border “can’t” be transgressed without moving from one ‘state’ to the other, irreversibly in time. The vulnerability of the assured readiness, addressed to a ‘you,’ is stark and frightening, but steadfast. It trembles, but it doesn’t hesitate, which threads through Hekmat’s poem.
“In the Bathroom” shows us the preciousness of privacy and a longing to escape surveillance. There’s desperation, too, in the employment of bits of cotton or chewing gum to plug holes. And still that trembling, reverberating from Iran to Syria. Hekmat can’t guarantee privacy in this bathroom, and even if he could, would the body believe it enough to process it as such? This is trauma: The em dash points like a sniper gun with a zoomed-in visual from somewhere he can’t distinctly identify. In other words, the threat is everywhere.
This poem also tethers nakedness—literally and metaphorically—to threat. To move within the range of hatred, control, and continued colonial violence is terrifying as the reach of eyes, weapons, and surveillance only seems to expand. The poem itself seems to be fighting to move within the range of anything else, to believe that it can one day live outside the range of the sniper, shell, or nearby explosion. And by the poem’s existence alone, it both does and doesn’t.
Together, these poems consider: Can we cross any line, whether through sacrifice, bravery, or safety, that’s far enough away or a sturdy enough door? Will that crossing ever feel far or safe enough in this world? How are these questions different for Maryam Ala Amjadi, Raafat Hekmat, me, and you?
And how does reading poetry help?
The trauma always lingers, forever the remainder in war’s cruel long division. “Broken Lines,” as the folio is titled, can refer to everything from lineages/ancestry, those crossed in protest, borders crossed in escape, taboos and the perseverance of derogatory names/stereotypes, tethers to worlds/lives, bones, healthy attachments to body/place, and ultimately, the line breaks of poems as poets write through real-life enjambment.
By reading these poets, we bear witness. We see language, craft, choices, and reality. We feel the draw of hope rather than despair, and how everyone has lines to break—lines that will allow us to build something like a poem in real life. That crossing, perhaps.
In tandem, I’d love to recommend Transient Worlds (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, and Poem-a-Day’s translation-focused curation, woven together by Maya C. Popa—a dear mentor—for September. Translation, of course, is in conversation with exile, war, borders and the way language can face them. My favourite is Nikola Madzirov’s “Silence Comes Somewhere Else,” about which he writes what feels like a perfect closing to this short essay:
“Absence is not silent. Poetry is the archaeology of unburied memories. Often, in my dreams, I see my dead mother coming home with bags full of fruit, while I run towards the apricot orchards. The scars of the unsaid appear on our faces while we sleep. My father still uses [my mother’s] old toothbrush to clean the edges of her picture frame on the gravestone and the letters of his own name engraved beside hers. This is his way of feeling more alive … like a poet trying to revise his already published poems, to create a new history.”
