Poetry: “Grace Period” by Yosra Bouslama
Sometimes, our dreams are so odd that they don’t really elucidate our anxieties, and other times, they’re uncannily precise in their replay of our feelings and experiences. Yosra Bouslama begins “Grace Period” inside of one dream, a dream about losing a more articulate, humorous self which existed in Arabic. All their dreams, the speaker says, are “nightmares about returning to a place that will spit [them] out” and “flatten any surplus / of [them]”—anxieties about losing the ability to remain in the United States and returning home made manifest in the subconscious so clearly that Freud would be disappointed. The poem closes with a story from the past which illustrates an additional layer: there are some who have not had to consider the reality of borders the way this speaker must.
Read Bouslama’s poem below.
Grace Period
The dream goes like this: I’m back home and I’ve lost my sense
of humor. Every joke I want to make is in English and its Arabic
twin slouches on my tongue. Everyone is confused. They don’t
recognize the boring, inarticulate person I’ve become. Maybe
the last seven years were just one drawn-out excuse to stumble over
words, they must wonder. Freud would sure be disappointed
with how transparent I’ve gotten lately. Nothing for his twisted
brain to nibble at. In a few weeks, my I-20 expires, and this country
will lose patience with the click of my steps. All my dreams are
nightmares about returning to a place that will spit me out, or
worse, suck me in like an unbuckled belly, flatten any surplus
of me. An ex once told me that he’s never even considered living
anywhere outside the country where he was born, and I remember
thinking, how nice it must be to look at borders and see a suggestion
Yosra Bouslama
Born and raised in Tunisia, Yosra Bouslama (she/her) moved to the United States in 2017 to pursue her graduate studies. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of North Texas, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Decolonial Passage, SWWIM, The Adroit Journal, and Prairie Schooner.
