Poetry: Aubade

By Aya Al-Telmissany

Once upon a rhyme, Poetry tucked me into 

a bed made of 

crepuscular light and long, warm alexandrines.

I slept at the edge 

of one verse and slum-

bered off to the next.

I was confined in a maze of parallel mirrors 

I was confined within empty anaphoras.

I jumped 

from line break 

to line break 

in search of meaning 

and landed

on my dimly sunlit bed

as an allegory 

of myself.

***

Aya is a poet, translator, and scholar. She has a Master’s degree in English and comparative literature, with a focus on women’s poetry, from the American University in Cairo. She is now pursuing a second Master’s in Interdisciplinary Middle-East Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She writes poetry in English and French and has been published by Anomalous Press, Poésie en Liberté, and Haus Für Poesie. She also won the Madalyn Lamont Literary Award in 2018 and 2022.