Cover Photo: W A T A R I
In anticipation of PRISM’s winter issue 57.2, we’re so excited to share “Bloodletting” by Djamila Ibrahim. This wonderful poem, as well as more of Djamila’s work, will appear in the print issue. Get your subscription now!
Bloodletting
I come home to find my mother alone
at the end of the silent corridor,
in the kitchen, carving goat flesh off bone.
I fancy the cold focus of horror
flick villains in her hands. Come, sit and learn,
she used to say, ginger then turmeric.
Now all silence. I grab a knife and turn
to face her stooped backbone. The nomadic
blood, Dad once told me, aches for departures
even when it’s singing of arrivals.
I think of bloodletting and the ruptures
of keening hearts, the rites of revivals
and how to ease my mother’s rigid limbs
back into the warm vigor of her hidden wings.
Djamila Ibrahim’s debut short story collection Things Are Good Now was one of Now Magazine’s 10 Books To Be Excited About in 2018 and has made several CBC lists of Books/Writers To Watch For in 2018 as well as being reviewed favourably in many other publications. She was formerly a Senior Advisor for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. She now lives in Toronto and is currently working on a novel.