2025 Misfit Poems Prize SECOND PLACE WINNER: “Fragments” By Fatema Alzari
A huge congratulations to Fatema Alzari whose poem “Fragments” was selected by Marianne Chan as the SECOND PLACE winner of the 2025 Misfit Poems Prize competition.
Writing about absence often becomes an act of curation — selecting and stitching together memories in an attempt to locate the emotional core. Absence, then, is not a void but a collection of fragments: an insistent mother, the taste of cardamom, a pair of blue socks.
In Fatema Alzari’s work, these fragments form a portrait of loss — shaped by strained relationships, spiritual expectation, and quiet disappointment. Her art carries these tensions with lyricism and a kind of tender sorrow.
Experience those fragments below.
Fragments
Baba, I have a memory — true or not true
1
My birthday: The evening drags its last cheer like a mouth on an empty hookah.
…لیمج ای ةولح ةنس …لیمج ای ةولح ةنس
ای ةولح ةنس …موطف ای ةولح ةنس …لیمج
I sit next to my mother in the face of a wilting cake. A sea of confetti fingers
swarm over my balloon head, and I look for your hands. Put away the fire—
quick! Yallah, yallah! But my breath hangs limply from my mouth, the moment
swallowed by a mangled candle. Mama insists. My cheeks swollen as a baby’s
first laugh, holding the ends of my twiggy breath. I save the air to follow your
faraway steps. She blows the fire, shows me how to let you go.
27
I am in a ceremony. The plant speaks to me in words shaped like cardamom. But its taste — as bitter as my mother’s face — does not drink well. I sit across from the shaman, and he pulls a dagger to my tongue. I swallow the black paste and a cough sinks in. The music howls in my bones:
Padrecito Cielo las gracias te damos, las gracias te damos
Por abrir el corazón a la sanacion
Abrirlo al amor
(x2)
A song for you, I convince myself.
5
It was a flood of cries, and it came from all over. Mama, khalas. Stop.
We are not fighting, she tells me. I am just talking to your dad. She has been
talking to you for years, with words as hungry as your silence. Each unanswered
plea, a slow beheading. My mother: a lamb sacrificed for your village pride.
حور !حور Go, go!
You leave, and I fold your absence like a dress my body inhabits.
يحور كایو. ذخو And take my soul with you.
27
Little Father Heaven, we thank you, we thank you
For opening the heart to healing
Open it to love
(x2)
The dagger tears through your myth of honour: father, mother, daughter.
The story, without a beginning or end, devours itself. And this carnage — a
dream by body swallow — rests in my palm like a broken mirror. I blink,
and suddenly I am wearing your face. When you call for me with your forked
tongue, I not hear:
يحور] rou.hi] my soul
I hear
يحور] rou.hi] leave me
13
You stand away from my mother: a city of exile. And in between, not my flesh — but the raging furnace above. Alone in bed, I cut out each instance Allah is mentioned in today’s newspaper. Out of respect, and in case of emergencies.
Lately, he is never in my mouth. I leave him stranded in a box. Out of respect, and in case of emergencies. That night, the roof leaked. I thought it was God talking to me. I looked to the sky and carved a prayer:
Burn them like Sodom and Gomorrah.
17
From across the table, you watch me take one careful bite of soft rice
at a time. Tuck it gently. Let your hand learn how to hold something.
I was blind to the way you tried to teach us tenderness, as if your blue
socks, suspended since last summer, were not a bomb site between us.
In that space of missing, I learned to fold the grain into a liquid-snot
moon — which I, then, swallowed, sticky as a habit, in the place of a daughter.
13
Nothing is promised, not even the advent of another rain fire.
Symbolism?
I often feel the need to turn to the failure of this kind of prophetic
wailing:
(ya _______, how can you take him away?)
(ya _______, how can you keep him here?)
In my diary, I put brackets to contain the distant echo of your ghost-flesh.
The grey folds of smoke offer all their scraps. The fog whispers your name.
A father is just a purposeful arrangement of absence.
Fatema Alzari
Fatema Alzari was born and raised in Bahrain. She is a writer and illustrator with a background in law. Growing up bilingual, it has created a unique sense of fragmentation and fusion of the self. This is reflected in her poems—exploring identity through the lens of language, writing often in both English and Arabic. During her years of immigration, she has accumulated a newfound understanding of what it means to belong and long to that which we perceive as home. Her work can be found in Crannóg Magazine, Sekka Magazine, Orangepeel Magazine, Bahr Magazine, Liverpool Art Festival amongst other print publications.
