Louise Glück

“Look! New York looks like Florence now,” I say. I’ve never been to Florence. I unravel, breathless. So small under the tallest skyscraper. So large in the city.  “Look, it doesn’t even look like New York!” I’ve never been to New York before. But I know. The simulacrum is in my solar plexus, and my head hinged above it, inflates. Umbrellas and tables spill to the sidewalks. Flowers and wrought iron fences line Little Italy like lace. All as new as the pandemic. As new as my realization of my guilty wins—I am not at the border, never arrived at Ellis Island. As a child, I read Shakespeare in a termite-stricken bungalow that rang with fruit sellers’ street calls. There, in the third-story study room, I learned all the nouns. “Florence” “New York” “Solar plexus.” At the interview for the student visa, I was prepared to say the right things. “Yes, I plan to return to my country. I’ll build a hospital and a library and help my parents get old.” Years later in New York, “The city is holding on!” I say to my new husband. But it’s me, all me, sure of myself. Sure of what this country and my lover have taught me.  The immigration lawyer and her cigaretted rasp: when she finds out I write poetry she says, It’s a woman, did you know? She’s my age and won the Nobel. She quizzes me, Is she really good? What does she write about? “Some great poems about divorce,” I tell her. This flusters her so she wraps it up, Good it’s a woman. Then, Are you Pakistani? You don’t look Pakistani. I nod to her blond bangs, hand waves of assurance. Your English is perfect or You’re not like any of those people who have no money and a thousand children or Look at you both, always touching each other. We walk through the dirty city after her pine-scented office, in pursuit of pasta.  “I love you,” I say. I believe the promise of America. We go to the MET, and they’ve acquired the shroud of the Kaaba that hung in Mecca at the Door of Repentance. In front of its screen of glass, the museum lights bathing us, I can’t touch it and don’t bow my head.

Dure Ahmed is an immigrant writer based in New Jersey. Their work has appeared in Guernica, ANMLY, Black Warrior Review, and Many Nice Donkeys among other journals. Dure’s work has been supported by the University of Arizona MFA program, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.