Antony Fangary

To keep the visual integrity of Antony Fangary’s poem intact, we have uploaded his poem as a jpeg. To help with accessibility issues surrounding devices for the visually impaired we have added the text minus the formatting below.

ya besha
by Antony Fangary

gidu taught me this phrase—
auqdit el khoaga
khoaga means
foreigner
it means
the westerners
who came to egypt
tumbled into our capital
like
a ball of snakes mating
auqdic
he said,
is a knot
a tangling of string
this inferior feeling
shedding skin
from village
to village
auqdit el khoaga, he said,
they saw our complexion
flexed against the riverbanks of the nile
& thinned us to a flattened python
a paved road

Antony Fangary is a Coptic-American Poet, Educator, and Artist living in San Francisco. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Oakland Review, New American Writing, Interim, Welter, and elsewhere. His chapbook, HARAM, was published by Etched Press in 2019. Antony was Honorable Mention of the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Prize, Finalist for the 2019 Wabash Prize, Runner-up for the 2020 Test Site Poetry Series, and holds an MFA from San Francisco State University.

ya besha

dear diary

Aftershocks