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 two alphabets poems by nadia hi. i'm nadia. i'm sixteen, a junior, and i live in michigan, where it is cold in a way my teta still takes personally. my parents came here from lebanon a few years before i was born. i went to arabic school every saturday morning from when i was six until i was twelve, so i can read arabic (slowly) and write it (badly), but i think in english, so english is what i write in. the arabic words are in italics, and there's a little glossary at the bottom so you don't have to guess. i spelled them the way we say them at home, which is not always the way a book would. my english teacher, mrs. wright, says i should send some of these to the school literary magazine. maybe. for now they live here. please don't copy them anywhere without asking me. thank you for reading. za'atar · first snow · my father after dinner · two words my mother uses my name in arabic in arabic my name has five letters and comes in three pieces, because two of the letters won't hold hands with whoever comes after them. nun holds on to alif. alif lets go. dal stands by itself like it's waiting for a ride. then ya and the little round ta, holding on at the end. teta says this is not sad. she says some letters just like their space. she says i am like that, which i think was a compliment. attendance every september a new teacher gets to my name and slows down like it's a word problem. nad, like sad. nad-ee-uh. nay-dee-uh, says the sub. (one year a lady said natalie and i said here because i was eleven and tired.) it's naa-dya. the first a is long, like you're holding the door for somebody. the rest is quick. teta says it right because she's the one who picked it. my mother says it right when she isn't mad. when she's mad it gets an extra syllable somewhere i can never find. the boy who sits behind me in chem asked me the first week how you actually say it, and then he said it. right. the first time. i'm not saying anything else about that. sunday on sunday the table has both leaves in it and my uncles still sit too close. tabbouleh in the big glass bowl, mostly parsley, the way it's supposed to be, kibbeh in the tray, cut into diamonds, grape leaves rolled so tight teta can tell whose are whose. (mine are the fat ones.) everybody talks at once in two languages and a half, the half being my cousins, who say yalla and okay in the same breath. my brother johnny eats only the bread. when you take seconds somebody says sahtein and you say back the thing about the heart. christie has eaten here so many sundays she says it back now without thinking. when you take thirds teta looks at you like you have finally understood something. two alphabets english goes left to right like somebody reading the paper. arabic goes right to left like somebody coming home. at saturday school we copied letters into notebooks that opened from the back, which i thought was the funniest thing in the world, when i was six. now i think in english and dream in english and do math in english, except when i count change for teta and then for some reason it's wahad, tnein, tleite, like the numbers live in her purse. the computer at our house can't make arabic letters at all, so teta's birthday card this year was in english, typed, with my name in arabic underneath in pen. she kept the card. she says she kept it for the pen part. i'm not two people. i'm one person who reads in both directions, which, if you think about it, is just reading more. za'atar teta mixes the za'atar herself from the bags her cousin mails with too many stamps on them. thyme, sumac, sesame, salt. she does it by smell. saturday mornings she spreads it on dough with olive oil, and the whole house smells like a place i have never been. in second grade a girl said my lunch smelled weird. in tenth grade a girl asked if she could try some. same lunch. first snow teta grew up in the mountains, so she says she knows snow. in her village it came in january, sat on the roofs for a few days looking pretty, and went back where it came from. here it comes in november and unpacks. the first winter she lived with us she stood at the sliding door in her housecoat and my dad's boots and said something in arabic that i am not going to translate because this is a clean page. this will be her third winter. she has a parka now, a purple one. she says khalas to the snow like it's one of my uncles. it doesn't listen either. my father after dinner my father is an engineer. he designs the part of a car seat that lets you lean back, which is a funny job for a man who never leans back. after dinner he watches the news with the sound low, waiting for a minute about lebanon that usually doesn't come. then he does the dishes. (he says in his family the men did not do dishes, and then he married my mother.) he hums something he won't tell me the name of. on fridays he drives forty minutes to the good bakery and brings home ka'ak and hands me one without saying anything, which is how he says most things. two words my mother uses my mother says yalla at seven-fifteen in the morning like a whole speech. yalla means come on, hurry up, let's go, i'm not saying it again, the bus is at the corner, where is your other shoe. my mother says habibti when i come home late from yearbook and the kitchen light is still on and she is pretending to read. habibti means my darling, but the way she says it at ten at night it means i was not worried, sit down, i saved you a plate. a little glossary spelled the way we say them at home. arabic has some sounds english doesn't, so these are close, not perfect.
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