Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she received a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation, and Crescendo Literary and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator. In addition to appearing in several journals and anthologies including “The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop,” her work has been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Estonian, and Greek. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology “Halal If You Hear Me.”
Safia has performed at venues such as TEDxNewYork, the South African State Theatre, the New Amsterdam Theater on Broadway, and TV1’s Verses & Flow. She was a founding member of Slam NYU, the 2012 and 2013 national collegiate championship team, and was a three-time member and former coach of the DC Youth Slam Poetry team. She is currently a teaching artist with Split This Rock.
Collection of poems
my body is a pill, small, and love is the wrong man’s tongue to tell me so
my body dissolves
my body finds men who are water and calls them home
my body is everything that happened to me
love is a thing my body borrows to forget
love is a pill
my body is water.
my body is a tongue and love dissolves
love calls the wrong men home
love makes my body a stain and goes
looking for water on the wrong man’s tongue
love is a house, my body is a bath drawn in floodwater
my body trickles in through the floorboards
love is the carpet that i’ve ruined
love is an alternative to water,
love is just something to do until the wars start
my body is a border drawn up by some man long ago
love is everything that happened in between
love is the floorboards
my body is decoration
love ruined all the carpets
my body is the carpet
my body is the stain
love makes it all dissolve
love is an alternative to home
love is floodwater
my body burned to the ground
my body called the wrong man home
love started the fire
my body is everything that happened after
the wrong man is an alternative to love
the wrong man is a map
home is where he puts the lines
my body is a border drawn by accident
by the wrong man’s tongue
love makes scars on my body and calls them borders
the wrong man mistakes my body for a body of water
love let the wrong man decide what my body mistakes for home
love started the fire
my body is a house on fire
my body drew a bath in floodwater
the wrong man is floodwater
love and the wrong man are an alternative to hating my body
my body is a body of water, poured over everything that happened to me
my body makes every scar an island
the wrong man makes my body small, a pill
love makes the water
and my body dissolves
I think I met all the
wrong men before
you and I think they
ruined me but I
think you’re really
handsome the way
a map is handsome,
with skin wide open
soaked in the whole
world’s ink. I
think I’m done pulling
paint off the walls I
think I want to read
you the names of
every city that ever
burned down, I think
we’d like it there.
our blue couch an invention
your hair the length of mine an invention
raw color of your mouth in the light an invention
color known best to butchers known best to girls
who use teeth where we kiss & in the hiss hot sun
my thinner parts go red to show the meat inside that
too is an invention you are with your new love now &
I want her to be unspecial I want her to be mild &
described as a [nice girl] but probably she is kind
I want to stop having the dream about a daughter
we share girl named for an island homeland
of our own I sent you away & installed
a wound in your place invented some
blood for the story
Saf my mother who named me calls me in & into tenderness
smooth bead of sound in the mouth the shortening we Safaa
(purity) & Safia (pure) share
I walk through the airport & walk through the world thinking everyone
(soft) (stop) (sob) is calling to me thinking everyone knows
my small intimate names (scarf) (scoff) & I belong by accident
I look up every time
the philosopher turns in his sleep dark hair a cursive
on the pillowcase & I want to unlatch my body
from its own sinking & love him back
later he tells me he loves my sadness & instead
of saying that’s not me I’m here somewhere behind it
I pretend to be asleep
his particular smell of pomegranates & smoke
unlatches from his body to visit me at night
years later in a city we do not share
his city burns on the news & I mean to call him
but he has since sealed up the wound belonging
to my name I miss him when I sit in airplanes
I miss him when an orange spark latches itself
to a coal I sit inside my small & unsaved
life & his haunting guards me carefully
while I float in & out of sleep