A POEM by JANNAH YUSUF AL-JAMIL

loving is like trying to think of a title for a poem (difficult)

Here's the truth, alright? Loving people is fucking hard. You know

what's easy to love? The sky at 8:02 on a summer evening, and hot focaccia

soaked in too damn expensive olive oil and with that weird Himalayan

pink salt and feeling it stuck on your molars. Loving a person is like

loving Vancouver or Dearborn or Dubai or Studio center of hell City, or

maybe more like loving your hometown, 'cause you only love the place you

grew up when you leave it and when you come back to it. Loving a person

is like taking a left-turn in Michigan: you take a long path for a small thing. But

it's easy to love your laugh and it's probably easy to love you, too, but maybe

I'm only realizing that because you're gone. Yeah, I'm the difficult one here. I

wouldn't blame you for trading me out for bread. Or weirdass left turns.

---

Jannah Yusuf Al-Jamil (they/them) is a young Muslim-American writer from Washington D.C. whose fatal flaw is unironically enjoying Dante's “Inferno.” They are the head literary writer of antinarrative zine and their writing can be found in Overheard and Ice Lolly Review. Learn more about them here.