Sara Elkamel
She Was Made Out of Wax
after Maki Suzuki
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I took a wrong turn and found myself at the climax of some pilgrimage that didn’t belong to me. I should have known the purple sky was taking me to the thin crust between this life and the next.
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With my own two eyes I saw one pilgrim hold a wax statue in her image. Saw her approach a massive crater in the sand and throw the miniature self as she prayed: Melt my evil, my cowardice, my disobedience.
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Make me good and brave and true.
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I heard someone who didn’t know anything about god say god is alive.
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The red sand thinned for miles around the crater—as if below the desert there was a sieve, and below the sieve another sieve.
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Pilgrims clutched their pilgrim figurines, gave their backs to the dunes in the distance, wheeled their arms back and shot.
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Make me brave and good and true.
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I heard someone who didn’t know anything about wax say it was bleeding.
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I heard someone who didn’t know anything about wax say give me something to stop the bleeding.
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We graze the animals within us across borders we do not recognize.
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Finding their new selves were neither brave nor good, some pilgrims did the journey over, changing their tactics. At the crater, they cut: thrust their limbs or organs, prayed only for replacements. Some needed new lungs, some, new fingers, and some were desperate—beside themselves with desperation—for a way to substitute the heart.
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Before she decided on the pilgrimage, one woman had visited healers of every kind. They offered remedy after remedy, all for nothing. The last man she visited suggested she wrap her midsection in the juice of twelve fresh figs then changed the number to seven, forty-six, five…
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In their last session together, the man sat there eating the skin of all the figs and asked: How important anyway, is the heart?
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Fuck that guy. Who can expel me from myself but myself?
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They are trying to trick you when they say: There is no need to know the language being translated. Having misread the instructions, some pilgrims started to hurl themselves whole into the crater.
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The women hired for weeping and wailing wore indigo scarves around their necks and slept deep into the afternoon.
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I had been living here, at this religious place I had visited with neither intention nor faith for years before I decided to open an on-site souvenir shop selling miniature body parts in wax.
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One woman was looking through the shelf of hearts when she suddenly rushed out, ran to the crater and screamed: THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN THIS.
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I watched her jump in, like I had many others. I could not have predicted that for forty-five days and nights to come, the woman would jump in and walk out, jump in and walk out; sometimes looking closer to herself than ever, sometimes emerging an unrecognizable stranger.
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Were we always like this, living on the very edge of life?
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It wasn’t a wrong turn.
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I followed the map in my hands.
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I wanted to be new.
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All those pilgrims.
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All of them were me.
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Even as we hungered for heaven.
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None of us knew anything about god.
Sara Elkamel is an Egyptian poet and journalist living between her hometown Cairo, and New York City. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at New York University. Named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal, Elkamel has had poems appear in The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, American Chordata, Winter Tangerine, and as part of the anthologies Halal If You Hear Me and 20.35 Africa, among other publications.